This Enchanted Life
by Lomonaaeren
Summary: HPDM preslash, sequel to 'Working With Them.' Harry and Draco hunt a twisted whose artifacts don't seem dangerous. But appearances can be deceiving. Sixth fic in the Cloak and Dagger series. COMPLETE.
1. Faithful to the Grave

**Title: **This Enchanted Life

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

**Pairing: **Harry/Draco pre-slash, mentions of Ron/Hermione.

**Rating: **R

**Warnings: **Violence, mental torture, flashbacks to physical torture, angst.

**Summary: **The newest wizard Harry and Draco have to hunt fits all the characteristics of a twisted, but the artifacts he leaves behind don't seem to damage or kill the people who use them. Combine this with Harry's changing feelings about his partner, their mutual attempts to get therapy, and a new theory about twisted, and their case is going to be anything but easy.

**Author's Notes: **This is the sixth fic in the Cloak and Dagger series, an alternating series of one-shots and longer fics where Harry and Draco are part of the Socrates Corps, hunting insane Dark wizards called the twisted. The prior fics are "Invisible Sparks" (one-shot), _Hero's Funeral_ (eight chapters), "Rites of the Dead" (one-shot), _Sister Healer _(10 chapters), and "Working With Them" (one-shot) in that order. This fic will probably be ten or twelve chapters. The series is updated every Wednesday.

**This Enchanted Life**

_Chapter One—Faithful to the Grave_

"Looked at the new file yet?"

Harry tensed his shoulders. Malfoy didn't know, couldn't know. There was no one who could know, because Harry very carefully hadn't told anyone.

He looked up and smoothed out the tension, because he wouldn't have anyone know _now_, either, when he had successfully concealed it for this long, that those were the very words Lionel had spoken to Harry at the beginning of the Gina Hendricks case, which had killed him. Harry shook his head and held his hand out. "No. It was on your desk when I came in. A definite twisted?"

"They don't know." Malfoy leaned back on his desk, his hip against it, and watched Harry with eyes as pale as rainwater. He had taken to doing that a lot lately, since the Alto case. Harry mentally shrugged and pulled out a handful of papers from the file, most of which seemed to be photographs. Well, if he paid attention, then it was possible that they wouldn't wind up in a situation like the Alto case again, with Malfoy going steadily mad under the influence of a twisted's power.

"They don't _know_?" Harry let his voice climb the scale, for the pleasure of winning a smile from Malfoy. This smile was gone in a few seconds, but Harry still felt the pleasure bubbling under his skin like warm tea. "I thought they weren't going to waste our time on cases any more that they weren't sure of. The time of Socrates Aurors is too valuable to be wasted, as Okazes would say."

"Let's put it this way," Malfoy said, and sat down behind his desk. "His name is Reynard Alexander, and he fits the characteristics of a twisted. But he doesn't seem to have killed anyone yet." He nodded at the file when Harry stared at him. "It explains it all in there."

Harry turned back to the photographs, wondering what they could be of, if not grisly murders. Perhaps Alexander injured his victims, instead, and left them alive.

Instead, the pictures were of small globes, little glass balls that sparkled and shone as if filled with fairy lights. Harry frowned and flicked through the papers, seeing more and more globes, all of them with subtly different patterns of lights, all of them doing nothing more than rolling back and forth at the flick of an Auror's finger. "And this is what they're worried about?" he asked at last, not trying to keep the disgust from dripping into his voice like dust into a clean room. "That he's catching fairies and trapping them?"

"Not fairies," Malfoy said, and stepped around Harry to lean over his shoulder. Harry arched his head back in spite of himself, the small hairs on the back of his neck prickling with Malfoy's closeness. Malfoy didn't seem to notice, and probably wouldn't have cared if he did. He ran his finger up and down one photograph, which showed a bright golden globe with an inner center of blue that reminded Harry of phoenix flame. "He makes them on his own. It seems to be his flaw."

"Little glass globes," Harry said blankly, and spread out the photos on the desk, hoping they would have at least one worth their time. Nope. All of them were globes, each one more beautiful than the last, but without any sign of why they needed to be handed over in a case file to the Socrates Corps. He tilted his head back to look at Malfoy.

Malfoy spread his hands. "A few people who held them have reported strange effects: tunnel vision, dizziness, intense dreams. And it's sure that Alexander did commit a theft—he stole some Potions ingredients from the shop where he used to work—and used Dark magic during it, and didn't use Healing magic when the shattering glass in the air opened a minor wound on his arm. Not to mention that he has companions with him, creatures straight out of nightmare. _Specific _nightmares," he added, when Harry opened his mouth to request more detail. "As in, the nightmares of the people facing him in the shop."

"Huh," Harry said, and rapped his fingers against the table. The globes glowed all the colors of the rainbow, and some combinations that should have been garish, and were instead gently pretty. _Ginny would have loved one of these as a present when we were dating, _he thought, and shook his head. "Any symbol?"

"No," Malfoy said quietly, shifting nearer. "But you were the one who discovered during the Alto case that twisted don't always have them."

Harry nodded unwillingly. The discovery had been unwelcome for the other Aurors in the Socrates Corps. They had a list of five characteristics that meant someone was twisted—symbol, companions, use of Dark magic, lack of ability to Heal, one ability of wandless magic—and they used it to act as executioners. Questioning that meant they might have to question some of their past captures and kills, and start doubting themselves.

"I think he is twisted," Malfoy said, and for a moment shadows lingered in the corners of his eyes, softened the corners of his mouth, and tainted his smile. "I have more reason than anyone to know that they can have unexpected abilities, and are dangerous whether or not they fit all the criteria."

Harry looked away for a moment. Yes, and if he had interpreted the reasons for Alto's not fitting those criteria properly, then perhaps Malfoy would have been spared a great deal of unnecessary trouble.

"You're thinking about her again," Malfoy said, and his fingers rasped across Harry's shoulder, rucking the cloth up across the skin.

Harry shrugged and tried to move his hand off. It stayed. Harry blew out his breath and admitted to himself that he didn't quite mind it staying there. "Of course I am. But you only said that I couldn't blame myself for what happened to you, not that I couldn't think about her."

Malfoy raised one eyebrow and bent towards him, his breath puffing out into Harry's ear and making him start before he thought about it. "I know when you're blaming yourself," he whispered. "Your eyes turn a unique color that I never see at any other time."

_He watches enough to notice that? _Harry had heard the same thing from Lionel a time or two, but Lionel had _reason _to watch him that closely. He had been—

_Your partner. The same as Malfoy. And that was all he ever was, no matter what someone else might think, or you might wish._

Harry relaxed, tilting his head back and pressing against Malfoy's fingers until he had to let go or risk getting them crushed. "Maybe I am," he said, and made sure to keep his voice deep and distant. "But I'm going to the Mind-Healer this week like a good little boy, so you can be sure that those thoughts won't stay for long."

"Does she force you to watch your memories in the Pensieve, then?" Malfoy stepped back from him, not even wringing his hand. Harry didn't know what to make of that, but pushed the thought aside. There were so many more important things to worry about, from the aftermath of the Alto case to whether Alexander was really a twisted or not.

"Yes," Harry said simply. "And she's got me to acknowledge that there was really nothing I could have done to prevent Lionel's death." _Except not tell him about being infatuated with him in the first place. _But Mind-Healer Estillo didn't know that, because Harry hadn't told her. He had confessed the secret, once, to save Malfoy's life and sanity. He never would again.

"Mmm." Malfoy settled back in his chair now and gave Harry a steady look. "I know the reasons that you argued we not go our sessions with Healer Estillo together—"

"And they're good ones," Harry interrupted. There were a whole host of reasons, but the two he thought best were that he and Malfoy might not confess their secrets as readily with someone else there, and that he couldn't know some of the details of the Sussex Necromancer case, the one where Malfoy had lost his former partner and which he would need to talk about with someone. The Ministry's rules said that, once a case file was sealed, only those who had been there and the Healers helping them recover could know what had happened on it. The records were never released to historians, and certainly not the papers.

"Mmm," Malfoy said again, and steepled his fingers beneath his chin, a habit Harry thought he might have picked up from Healer Estillo. He wanted to bare his teeth each time Malfoy did it. It made him look so _calm_, but Harry had looked into his eyes while the man tortured him and knew that sometimes he was anything but. "I was reconsidering that. It is true that you would not ordinarily be allowed to know any details of the Necromancer case, but the case I truly need help with is the Alto affair."

"And I already know most everything about that one," Harry finished reluctantly.

Malfoy leaned forwards, and hell, his eyes could be piercing silver nails when he wanted them to. "Everything," he whispered. "Except the details Estillo has learned since the case, the nightmares I have and the lingering effects of being under the control of someone who could do what she did. Come with me and learn them."

Harry swallowed. He wanted to turn away, to laugh, to remind Malfoy that he hadn't extended the invitation in return for Malfoy to attend his sessions and really didn't want to, but he didn't know a graceful way to refuse when Malfoy was staring at him.

Which meant he didn't know a way to refuse.

"I—all right," Harry said. He blinked, and shook his head. No, Malfoy hadn't held out his hand as if he wanted to clasp Harry's and draw him to his feet. Why had Harry thought he had? He was getting too little sleep and too much of everything else, Harry thought, although that was normal for him these days. "If you really want me to," he added then. "I don't want you to feel that you owe me something you're not comfortable with."

Malfoy turned his head back so that his eyes were fastened on Harry, and his gaze was so bright Harry flinched a little. "I'm aware of exactly what I owe you," he said, and then he turned back to the Alexander file and was normal again. "Now. What do you want to do first, interview the witnesses to Alexander's theft or investigate what's known about the globes he makes?"

"I could do the interview, and you could investigate the globes," Harry suggested. "Says here the Unspeakables have them. They'd be more likely to talk to you than to me." Harry's reputation as the Auror Department's problem child had spread all over the Ministry.

"Mmm," Malfoy said again, and Harry was starting to _hate _the shape his lips went when he did that. "Together, I think."

His words were metallic enough that the "I think" was obviously a courtesy. Remembering how they had split apart during the Alto case, though, and what had happened as a consequence, Harry couldn't blame him. He nodded and stood. "All right. So which first?"

* * *

Draco looked around the interior of Eleanor's Enchantments, and nodded once. Not the cleanest apothecary he had ever been inside, but a long way from the worst. He reached out a hand, and the dust that came away from the shelves under his fingers was made of crumbled powder from moth-wings, not the ordinary dust of dead skin cells and drifting sunlight.

Draco smiled. _Clean, for the most part, but not careful._

He wondered if Alexander could have taken the ingredients he wanted without disturbing the shop owners, and then shook his head. Alexander would do nothing sane when he was a twisted.

Which led to the question of what he thought he was doing with small glass globes that shone with light and did nothing else. He had placed two of them on the ground outside the shop before he began his theft, but since he had smashed straight through the shop's front window to steal the ingredients, they seemed useless as a covering gesture or a measure of stealth.

Draco turned back to listen to Potter's conversation with Eleanor, or the woman who stood in her place; she had said that her mother was the one who had set up the shop. Leah Anderson was a straight, small, proud woman with thin blonde hair that clustered around her forehead and a mouth that never stopped moving, though what she was chewing was usually either a quill or a sherbet lemon instead of words. Draco wrinkled his nose at the piercing smell of the sweet. She was the first person he had met since Dumbledore who actually liked them.

Potter leaned on the counter, smiling at her. She smiled back, even as her mouth continued to work and she turned her eyes aside. People liked to smile at Potter, Draco had found, whether or not he had done something for them during the war. Something about the bright green eyes and the way his dark hair curled appealed to them.

Draco turned back to the shelf he'd been inspecting and found that his fingers had curled down on the shelf-edge, jolting a few of the jars towards him. He replaced them with careful hands, sniffing in spite of himself. He had chosen not to work with Potions, but he loved and understood the art, and trying to find out what Eleanor's Enchantments had in stock was as natural as trying to learn the details of a witness's experience.

Soot in one, he thought. Powdered bat-eyes in the other. And in the one in front of him, a scent he didn't recognize.

Draco subtly glanced over his shoulder. Leah was laughing now, and Potter had a light in his eyes that one could take as flirtatious.

If one did not know, as Draco did, his dedication to his job and his secret love affair with his dead partner.

_So secret that even Vane did not share in it, _Draco thought, and shook his head as he carefully withdrew his hand, brushing as if by accident against the lid of one of the jars so that it tilted to the side and revealed the contents. _The man was a fool if he thought he could put Potter off with a façade of normality and have him simply accept it._

Potter's obsession, though, mattered little next to the facts of the case they were investigating, save a wound that Draco had to keep in mind the way he would a half-healed injury his partner had not recovered from. At the moment, he was more interested in the contents of this jar.

Red dust, he thought at first, and wondered if it was something as ordinary as powdered brick that had fooled his nose. Some of the apothecaries in the wizarding world kept artifacts from the Muggle world on hand; there were Potions masters who believed them more efficacious in some brews than ingredients that could absorb lingering magic around them. Draco knew those Potions masters were fools, but they did not often ask him for his opinion.

Then a cloudy, sweet odor from the jar struck his nose, and he raised his eyebrows. He still didn't recognize it specifically, but he knew the copper scent of blood whatever had been done to disguise it.

"What are you doing?"

Leah had noticed his preoccupation, then. Draco turned around with a bow, letting the lid fall back into place on top of the jar. "Your pardon, Miss Anderson. I knocked the shelf and nearly knocked the jars over."

Leah bustled past him to fix the jars and glance into them as if to ensure that he hadn't stolen a pinch of dust. Potter narrowed his eyes at Draco in question over her shoulder, and Draco stared back, telling him without words that he had a good reason for his supposed carelessness and not to bother him.

Potter half-tossed his head and glanced away. He had done that more and more often lately, Draco noted in the back of his mind, and not because he didn't know what Draco was trying to say to him. Rather, their communion, their growing ease around each other at work if not outside it, disturbed him. Perhaps he thought it disloyal to Vane or Weasley to work well with someone else.

_Too bad, _Draco thought, and his fingers tightened again, on his wand this time, as he thought about it. _Because you're mine now._

"I really must ask you to come away from there," Leah said, apparently satisfied that he hadn't taken any bat's eyes or dried blood with him. "The ingredients can be changed by—oh, any number of spells." Her hands fluttered anxiously over all the jars, but Draco knew it wasn't his imagination that she lingered too long over the one with the red dust. Draco smiled at her, though, and strolled back to the counter, already determined to see what else she might be hiding in here.

"And that's a full list of the ingredients he took?" Potter asked, shifting forwards as though to hide Draco behind his shoulder. Draco took advantage of the distraction to cast a nonverbal charm on his nose.

The smells of the shop immediately sharpened to the point that Draco had to clench his teeth, because good _God_, he was overwhelmed. His training in Potions at Professor Snape's hands helped him here; he breathed in, breathed out, and began to sort through the scents that were unfamiliar, finding the ones he knew and separating them in a catalog in his head.

Fur, amber, common spices such as nutmeg and marjoram, half a hundred different kinds of flowers, powdered unicorn horn, dragon scales and eggshell and claws, and more cloudy and sweet odors than he could comprehend at once. Draco frowned. _Why would a shop have that many different kinds of powdered blood on hand? _

Dragon's blood, perhaps, if the shop was carefully licensed. Unicorn blood, though at a fabulously expensive price. Merfolk and centaur blood, those almost without asking. Draco had even heard of apothecaries who maintained stores of house-elf blood, though that was not used for many potions. But this…

It was not even human blood, or not exactly. Human blood would smell a bit different coming from a different person, but, over and above all, coppery. This was not that. Draco's nose twitched, and he sneezed. That made Leah glance up from the list she was looking over with Potter.

"Is something wrong, Auror Malfoy?" Her voice had a polished tone it hadn't had before, and she had swallowed or spit out whatever she was chewing. She suspected him.

Draco turned around with the same faint smile he had used before to try and convince her nothing was wrong. She suspected him anyway, because of his surname, and it was the reason he had left Potter to talk to her. "No, madam. But I am unusually sensitive to some of the odors in a shop like this. It's one of the reasons I chose to be an Auror instead of a Potions master myself."

He had thought that a reassuring lie, but Leah's eyes dilated, and she fell back a step. Then she swallowed, said, "Of course," and tried to turn back to the list in front of Potter as though nothing had happened.

Potter was the one who prevented that, laying a fragile hold on her wrist with one hand and leaning in as if he would sniff her hair. Draco had to turn away and study a shelf of ingredients to keep from spitting with contempt.

"Are you all right?" he heard Potter ask. "Has Alexander threatened you?"

"Not directly, no," Leah said, and sniffled as if, now that she didn't have something in her mouth to hold it back, snot would come out her nose. Draco sniffed himself, discreetly, but the charm had begun to fade, and he smelled only the dying traces of those intense smells that had come to him before. "But it's more than that. It's the way he looked at me when he walked into the shop, as if he despised me and all I stood for."

_Something he and I have in common, _Draco thought, and eased forwards. There was a crate of what looked like half-opened jars in the corner. He wanted to see whether those jars held more of the red dust. He wouldn't be surprised if they did, but he would be curious to hear what Leah's explanation was for them.

The bell above the shop door jangled softly. Draco turned to look, already forming an explanation in his mind of "important Auror business" that would encourage the visitor to leave.

He lost his breath when he saw the man. He had silver-white hair that reminded Draco of his father's, and calm dark eyes. He wore a much-patched blue robe, and walked about with his hands in his pockets, as if he was going to pull out a string of handkerchiefs like a Muggle magician.

But none of those details by themselves would have made Draco react that way. The last time he had seen those dark eyes, they were staring at him from a photograph on the first page of a file.

Reynard Alexander smiled at them and drew his hands out of his pockets. Each held a glass globe, one of them swarming with blue and gold, another with purple and green. He hurled them straight at Potter and Draco. Draco dodged to the side, and chanted up a Shield Charm around himself.

When he turned to look, it was to see that Potter—like the idiot he always was if Draco wasn't there to catch him—hadn't Shielded himself, but Leah, and flung his body in the way of the flying globe. The globe hit Potter's skin and clung there a moment, glowing fiercely, before it burst apart.

Potter cried out as flying shards of glass and sparkling lights swarmed him. Draco dropped the Shield and moved forwards to stand next to him, staring at Alexander. Alexander bowed to him and turned away, vanishing out the door.

Potter opened his mouth as though to say he was all right. Then his eyes rolled back in his head and he slumped, boneless, to the floor.

Leah screamed.

Draco cast a Silencing Charm on her without thought and stooped down to gather Potter in his arms, fierce hopes and wishes jostling in his head. _He can't be dead. He wouldn't dare. Please._


	2. A Vision of Life That Could Be

Thank you for all the reviews!

_Chapter Two—A Vision of Life That Could Be_

Harry woke to light.

He sat up on his bed and stared around. He had soft grass beneath him, grass that traveled away towards the horizon in ripples of green on green, of gold on gold. He reached out and pulled, and the grass rose and followed his hand. Yes, it felt real, and when he held it to his nose, the smell was sweet but not unbelievably so.

Had they brought him to this place to heal? That would make sense, in a weird way, since they couldn't bring him to St. Mungo's, not with the ban on him coming into hospital there. Harry touched his arm, where he knew the globe had struck him, and then his head. He shook it. Nothing happened except the ordinary sloshing of what little brain he had—as Malfoy would say—against his ears.

Well. It appeared he had been right to use the Shield Charm on Leah after all. He had thought he wouldn't need to protect himself because the globes were so harmless in all the reports that came up in the Alexander file. And if he was dreaming, this was more pleasant than his dreams had been for a long time.

He stood up and looked around. Yes, there were places in the distance where the grass began to slant up, and he could see hills there. He looked the other direction, and there was a lake, shining clear and blue, a reflection of the mild sky overhead. A haze in the distance told Harry this place might have a storm later, but for now, it wasn't doing that.

He would walk. Why not?

He chose the lake as a random direction, and headed downhill towards it. The slope was gentle, never more than he could handle. Harry smiled as a gentle breeze touched his face and carried a dipping, swirling white butterfly with it. He was now convinced this place was a dream, but he would take it.

He came to a halt on the grassy shore of the lake, and paused. He hadn't realized how big it was until he was close, and now it swirled away, rather like the butterfly, in a cloudy mixture of sand and gravel and flowers and swamp. On the far shore, probably about fifteen minutes' walk if he went around the lake, was a small white house, beneath the biggest oak tree Harry had ever seen, with the whole house in the shade of its branches.

"Hello, Harry."

Harry felt his heart squeeze itself in, but not stop. It had done the stopping already, when it came to that voice, and then had to go on beating. He turned around slowly, pivoting on one heel, and almost praying that he wouldn't see the person he knew that voice belonged to, after all.

Lionel pushed himself up from leaning on a slender sapling and came towards him, smiling. He had on dark purple robes of the kind that he liked to wear on his day off, and his shaggy dark hair hadn't been recently combed. His eyes shone with the same laughter they always had, though. That was what Harry missed most about him, his laughter. God knew there was precious little in most of his life.

"I—Lionel," Harry whispered, and reached out. He didn't think he would touch anything solid, though the rest of the dream felt solid enough, but Lionel's palm came to rest against his, as warm and callused as it had been when they touched hands in victory after a case. Harry stumbled towards him, pulled by Lionel's arm.

And then something happened that had certainly occurred in Harry's dreams before, but furtively and guiltily. It said something, he had thought later, that he found it hard to imagine even after he had fallen in love with Lionel.

Lionel kissed him.

Tenderly, cradling Harry's face in one hand; with a reverent manner that made Harry's heart rebound painfully inside his chest and his ribs ache with longing; with one hand on the back of his neck, as if he would urge Harry further into the kiss, further into his mouth, but didn't know how comfortable he would be with that. Lionel drew back and smiled, eyes shining as steady as stars.

"You—how did you know I wanted to be kissed like that?" Harry whispered. It might not be the smartest question ever, he thought, when Lionel was doing this for the first time and Harry could drive him away again easily. But he had to ask it, he couldn't have stayed in the dream and not asked it, and from Lionel's slow smile, it was the right thing to say.

"I didn't know, not specifically," Lionel asked, putting one hand on the small of Harry's back and guiding him along the shore of the lake towards a bridge that Harry hadn't noticed before. Well, no wonder, when it looked like it was made of ice and fairy lace and shimmered weakly grey in the sunlight, hardly different from the water it arched above. "But it was obvious from the way you looked at me, really. The way you reached out towards me and then snatched your hand back, as though you thought I would deny you a sweet."

Harry took a slow breath and forced it out, as well as the words that had to come with it. "Well, _yes_. You did deny me, Lionel. You denied that you felt anything for me, you said you wished I hadn't told you, and after that, you spent less time with me and didn't trust me to guard your back. I—I know I shouldn't have said anything, but you denied me."

Lionel sighed. "Yes. In that life, that was the only thing I could think of to do. After all, I thought, I liked women, and there are regulations against Aurors dating their partners, or there used to be, and I didn't want the publicity."

"The publicity of dating Harry Potter?" Harry asked softly. He'd never thought that might be part of it, but of course, he should have. Lionel hadn't talked about that, but he hadn't talked about any of it, really, so Harry shouldn't have thought he knew everything that was going through his head.

"Right," Lionel said. They walked out on the bridge, and Harry braced himself for the clatter of their footsteps across it, only to find that they were nearly walking in silence. He blinked and stopped himself with one hand on the railing, staring at Lionel. "But that was that life. This is _this _one." He paused, then added, with a smile. "And I think I have too many that's and thises in there."

Harry smiled back. _This is so hard with Malfoy, to laugh. I wonder why I didn't think of that before, when I was trying to improve my partnership with him. _"I think you do, too," he said, as they came down on the other side of the bridge and towards the cottage. "But—Lionel, I don't understand. What is this life? Where are we?"

"A vision in your mind," Lionel said, pausing with one hand on the door of the cottage and staring at him. "Something that's not real. But could be."

Harry licked his lips and thought about that. "All right," he said at last. "But I don't exactly understand—I mean, how can something in my mind become real? I've never trained in mind magic. I don't know anything about it—"

"More than you think," Lionel said, leaning one hip on the door so that it opened further. Harry saw a room beyond decorated in blues and greys, and had to keep from bolting forwards. That was a room that looked exactly the way he had imagined that the drawing room in his ideal house would be decorated someday. "Someone who's been exposed to Legilimency and Occlumency the way you have knows plenty about it."

Harry scratched the back of his neck, and avoided Lionel's eyes. They expected something of him he didn't know how to give. "But how?"

"The globes are the chance," Lionel said, leaning forwards. "The key. You have to concentrate on them, to learn why they affect some people and not others, and you have to go back and talk to Leah—"

And the darkness closed in, whirling with colors like a Portkey, shutting Lionel away. Harry lunged desperately for him, and Lionel held out his hand and scraped his fingers against Harry's. But he was going, he was fading, and the first moments of _life _that Harry had felt in several months went with him.

Harry tried to hang onto the light, but opened his eyes to a different, dimmer light instead, inside a private Healer's practice, with Malfoy leaning above him and staring into his face. Harry grimaced. Ordinarily he would have been pleased to see that Alexander's attack hadn't hurt Malfoy, but at the moment, Malfoy's face was a poor trade for Lionel's.

"Are you all right?" Harry asked, through a scratchy throat. He grimaced again and reached up to touch it. Had he screamed? Or been screaming? He couldn't remember anything like that when the globe hit him, but he had to admit that his memories of those moments were somewhat confused.

Not the memories of Lionel, though. They stood out, not like the images of a dream, either confused and slippery or brighter than real life, but as if it were another life, a different one. Harry swallowed and focused on Malfoy.

"Well?" he demanded, because Malfoy hadn't answered his question, but continued to frown down on him as if Harry had got himself knocked unconscious on purpose. "What's wrong?"

* * *

_You jumped in front of someone you didn't know, again, to save them. Without knowing what the globes would do. What do you think is wrong? _

But the Auror Healer who had agreed to work with them when Potter was injured sat nearby, examining a sample of the glass globe that had hit Potter in a potion, and Draco didn't want to disturb her, or talk about things that were none of her business to overhear. He leaned towards Potter and murmured instead, "Alexander got away. No one was hit but you, and you fainted immediately. What do you remember?"

"Of the attack itself?" Potter tried to sit up. Draco pressed him back down. The Healer hadn't been able to find anything that could have stunned Potter, but on the other hand, that couldn't be good news. Potter rolled his eyes, but lay flat again. "Not much. That he walked in, that he flung the globes, that one of them went towards you and one went towards me, and I had time to Shield Leah." He scanned Draco with suddenly brighter eyes. "And you're sure you're fine? Nothing hit you?"

"I didn't throw my body between a globe and anybody," Draco snapped. Apparently some of his anger did want to come out now.

Potter blinked at him, then gave him a surprisingly bitter smile. "I thought the globes were harmless, so I could safely risk taking them."

"Then why not trust to your Shield Charm?" Draco pressed. "There's still no reason to hurl yourself between one of them and Leah, if you thought them dangerous enough that you Shielded her."

Potter looked away from him and huffed a little. "Would you believe that I thought I could catch one? I thought having one to study for ourselves, without the Unspeakables getting hold of it, would be a good idea."

Draco might have believed it, yes, if Potter had looked at him. Instead, he glanced away, and that meant something when he had a partner as Gryffindor as Potter was, as stubbornly committed to sacrificing his own life. Draco lowered his voice to a hiss. "I can't trust you if you lie to me. So don't start."

Potter grimaced as though he had swallowed a mushy apple, then swallowed in reality and nodded. "All right. I—wasn't thinking. The way I wasn't thinking when I didn't tell you about the blue-eyed twisted. It was something that mattered to me, that I _should _have shared with you, but I didn't hide it from you on purpose. It just slipped my mind."

Draco took a long breath. In his mind, the words he could speak mingled with the words he'd like to speak, and neither was appropriate at the moment. He waited several seconds until he had new words. "I thought this was something you worked on with Mind-Healer Estillo. That you had agreed that just thinking about your own safety as something unimportant, the priority on the bottom of your list, was a bad idea."

Potter shut his eyes and sighed. "Yes, we discussed that."

He said nothing more. Draco clutched at his robe for a moment and then said, "Well? It didn't have results?"

Potter sighed again and pinched his nose. "Because it's thoughtlessness instead of action, and the only action I can take about it is being more mindful, I forget it more easily. So it slipped my mind again. Sorry."

"I think there _is _action you can take," Draco said. He hadn't suggested this before because Potter still had reason to distrust him over being under Alto's influence, but he would now. "If we train together on defensive maneuvers _other _than you putting your body between someone and whatever threatens them, the way you threw yourself in front of me on the Larkin case and now."

Potter blinked at him, then bristled as though suddenly realizing he could. "I'm _good _at defensive magic."

"But you're not good at applying it to yourself," Draco said quietly, and thank Merlin, he had the right tone now, if the way Potter nodded was any indication. "I think we should practice."

Potter cocked his head. "You can come up with ways to practice something like that?" A hint of respect glimmered in the back of his eyes.

Draco found that he was smiling. He enjoyed the way Potter respected him. He enjoyed being able to come up with solutions that Potter hadn't, for things he might not even have realized were problems. Of course, some of that came from Draco's different perspective and skills, and some were ideas that anyone could have suggested because Potter was a bloody _idiot _at times, but Draco was still the one who had Potter gazing at him like that.

_I would not give this up, if the Ministry offered me a trained and experienced partner who might guard my back better tomorrow._

"Yes," he said. "More easily than I can come up with constant, efficient, intelligent ways to rescue you."

"Ouch," Potter said solemnly, but his smile had spread across his face now, and he lay back against his pillow as though Draco had eased his pain more than the Healer had. He paused a moment, gazing into the distance, and then said, "Yes, you need to know this, too. I had a really vivid dream while I was asleep. And I saw Lionel."

Draco narrowed his eyes. He would not react to that name the way he wanted to, with the Healer in the room. Perhaps it wouldn't matter, and Potter had not watched his words and reactions, but Draco was not Potter, and that was the basis of their relationship. "Vane," he said, and exhaled hard. "Alive?"

"Well, he knew he'd died," Potter said. "In the real world. He told—he told me that the world of the dream might become real, if I could learn the secret of the globes. He advised me to go back and talk to Leah."

Draco leaned towards him. "You think this is a side-effect of Alexander's globes, and not a dream you would have normally?" he asked.

Potter's half-smile, uncertain and fragile from the first, narrowed. "Yes," he said. "Because I don't dream about Lionel that way all the time, you see, even with references to current cases running through my head. I have nightmares about him instead."

Draco ground his teeth. If they were alone, he could have explored that reference, demanded that Potter say what he really meant, drawn the history of the dreams out of him, and perhaps convinced him to speak to Healer Estillo about _them_, too, if he hadn't already. It was one reason he had wanted to start combining their sessions. Not knowing how much Potter had shared about Vane with the Mind-Healer was driving him mad. Potter couldn't heal without letting more people into the secret, Draco was certain, but he seemed to consider it some sort of betrayal of the dead.

_And the living. _If one did know the truth behind his infatuation with Vane, it provided a channel of astonishing vulnerability into Potter.

"All right," Draco said. "Then we need to figure out why your reaction was different than those of the others who touched the globes and _did _have a reaction. And I have a list of the names we'll need."

Potter smiled and started to sit up. "You're amazing, Malfoy," he said. "To gather that information and do it all on your own, or to remember to bring it—I wouldn't have, when we went and talked to Leah."

Draco felt as though he had ascended a mountain and was standing breathless in the cold air at the top, to hear Potter's compliment. He banished the sensation and took a step up, pushing Potter back into the bed. "You aren't going anywhere yet. Healer Limerent has to make sure that you don't have any other side-effects."

The Healer, who was very good at pretending to be professionally deaf whatever Draco might fear to trust her with, lifted her head with a tempered smile. "The samples of Auror Potter's blood and flesh look normal, and the globe shard is only glass," she said. "If he could cast for me, to make sure that nothing is different as far as that goes?"

Potter nodded and took up his wand. Draco watched him covertly, wondering as he did so _why _he did so. No one would think it strange that he was deeply interested in the way his partner used magic, not when he had to trust in that magic to save his life.

But others didn't know the sensations that thickened his throat and blood when he watched Potter, the way he handled the wand as a natural part of his arm, the way the magic shone and foamed around him like a wave washing in from the ocean and the way that he seemed unaware of it. Did he _know _how powerful he was, and that other wizards didn't live their lives like that, in the middle of a constant storm and dance of magic?

_I doubt he knows, _Draco decided wisely. _And I doubt he would try to do anything about it if he did. He thinks it—natural. He doesn't think it's something to be proud of._

It was strange. Potter was pig-headedly obstinate, he was bloody-minded to the point of despair, but he wasn't arrogant, not in the same way Draco had seen other wizards be arrogant. He seemed to think he had nothing in particular to be proud of, as a matter of fact, and would probably stare at people who told him he did.

Meanwhile, Potter lifted his wand and pointed it at the far wall, saying with a calm that Draco had rarely heard from him, "_Lux clara!_"

The light that hit the far wall with a roar came out of Potter's wand like a ribbon of gold-white cloth stretched across the air, and threw the wall into sharp relief. Healer Limerent started to her feet, then pushed her loose brown hair back from her face and handed Potter a reserved smile. "That will do very well, Auror Potter. And if you can cast with that focus and power, then I will declare you recovered, and fit to fight for your life against Dark wizards if you want."

"I want," Potter said, lowering his wand, but he was giving the holly wood a puzzled glance that Draco didn't miss.

"What is it?" Draco asked. He had learned never to leave things like that alone. Potter proclaimed the truths of his soul constantly, with his gestures and his expressions and his words, but let them fester too long and he would try to bury them the way a cat buried its shit.

"I—don't know," Potter said. "I felt well, certainly. Better than well, better than I've felt in a while. As though some burden or shadow had been lifted from me." He bit his lip and eyed his wand once more.

"You weren't holding your wand in the hand which the globe struck," Draco said, half-closing his eyes so he could remember the scene with more accuracy. "Do you think it could have affected your wand in any way?"

"The bond between the wizard and his wand can't be changed in such a way," Limerent interrupted, sounding dead certain. "I've worked with many patients over the years, and never encountered magic that could do such a thing from the outside. If it came in through the wand core or damaged the wood, yes, that would be something, but…"

Draco ignored her and focused on Potter, on his expression, his account of the experience. The one thing he had learned for certain over the years was that nothing normal happened around Harry Potter. If a wizard's bond to his wand could be changed or damaged by a twisted's flaw, then that would happen to him.

Potter stared at his wand, and said nothing. Then he shook his head and said, "No, it's—it's fine, I think, Draco. Really. I know I could cast an offensive spell and have it count." He looked up and smiled at Healer Limerent. "But I don't want to damage the office of the Healer who was intelligent enough to ignore St. Mungo's strictures and help me."

_He could quit the bloody flirting, _Draco thought, but he nodded reluctantly. He had earned more of Potter's trust than he had dared hope to retain, or perhaps it was the other way around, but he knew when he couldn't push something. Potter would recover fully or not, but Draco had to trust his word for now.

"We will go and speak with the people who were affected by the globes," he told Potter firmly. "And hope that we can find someone who has a dream similar to yours."

Potter gave Draco a painful half-smile. "Not exactly similar, I hope. I hope no one else had to go through what I did when I lost Lionel."

Draco stepped towards him and lowered his voice. "You didn't kill him. He chose not to trust you enough to rely on you completely anymore. You told the truth, and he punished you for it. He should have known you better, been enough your partner to know that you wouldn't do anything to him that he didn't want you to."

"The trust in a partnership goes both ways, though," Potter said quietly, and his hand rose to brush against Draco's arm. "I should have known him enough to know what he could handle, and that he wouldn't be able to handle this." He squeezed Draco's arm. "Thank you for knowing me so well."

There was little that Draco could say to that, especially in front of Healer Limerent, however much he might want to. He ended up nodding curtly and then following Potter with his eyes towards the door of the Healer's office.

"He's a rare one, isn't he?" Limerent said softly, and Draco glanced sharply at her. She was looking after Potter, and there was an expression in her face that Draco might have been able to translate as wistful longing.

Draco hurried after Potter, bristling. He didn't know why, but she had made him feel that way.

And as if he wanted to hurry up to Potter, spread out an arm, block him from sight, shield him from it.

_The next thing I know, I'll be thinking that she's in league with Alexander, _he decided irritably, and deliberately kept several paces behind Potter until they were out of the office.


	3. Thoughtful in Moderation

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Three—Thoughtful In Moderation_

"I can't even describe what it was _like_, the headache I got from it." Erin Syles's hands came up and waved around her hand, then dropped. When she nodded, her thin blonde hair flew. When she put down her cup of tea to gesture again, the table rocked. "I had to go home and lie down under a Dreamless Sleep Potion for six hours just to get it to go away."

"And why is that?" Potter asked, leaning forwards with a faint smile, the same he seemed to use to romance everyone around him, from Leah to Healer Limerent to, now, this woman who had been the first to touch one of Alexander's globes. Draco cleared his throat pointedly and let one hand glance off Potter's knee. Potter never looked away from Syles, but did tilt his head to the side, as if to ask Draco what he should stop doing.

_As if he doesn't know. _Draco knew that part of this—this _friendliness _came from the manner that Potter used to interview everyone. He wanted to act cheerful, to draw them out. Draco used different methods. He was the one people turned to when they wanted a stern accounting of what had happened to them, some reassurance that their tormentors would be caught and punished.

_But I never flirt. _

"The Dreamless Sleep?" Syles rocked back and forth on the couch, her fingers drumming on the edges of the cushions. Draco hid an expression of acute nausea as best he could. He would hate to live with someone like Syles every day, who made every gesture a campaign of conquest, whose words overran others' in conversation like soldiers overrunning a border. "Because I was seeing these visions in my head. Hallucinations, from the headache. Dreamless Sleep was the only way I could get them to go away."

"Ahhh," Potter said, a drawn-out noise that Draco didn't think he needed to give as much emphasis as he did. "So you had dreams. Nightmares, or—"

"How can they be dreams when I was awake when I was having them?" Syles snapped back towards him and frowned at him. They were in the center of her overlarge drawing room, so big that it pushed the kitchen and bedroom and bathroom back towards the edges of the house. _Rather like her, _Draco thought. In the middle of all that space, a trio of white chairs huddled as though hiding from predators. "No, they were visions."

"Pleasant ones, or unpleasant ones?" Potter changed his words with a smile at Syles that made Draco grind his teeth. Yes, he liked being partnered with Potter in many ways, and he didn't want what he had suffered at the twisted Healer Alto's hands to break them apart, but he would never be as _unprofessional _as Potter was being.

"Pleasant ones, of course!" Syles took a step nearer and lowered her voice to an intense half-shout. "That's the way they trick you, artifacts like that. They give you something pretty to look at, and they trick you into taking them home."

"So when you touched the globe—"

"I didn't know this Alexander bloke had thrown it as a weapon," Syles said, repeating information that had been in the original file they'd been given, information that Draco thought they could dispense with. When he shifted his body in a formal signal, however, both Potter and Syles ignored him, so intent on staring into each other's eyes that they didn't notice the hard-working Auror they disregarded. "It was just on the ground after one of his attacks." Then she paused and cocked her head, hair once again wisping around her like the far edge of a maelstrom. "But can you call it an attack if it didn't injure anyone?"

"It caused property damage," Draco intervened coolly, "and it could have injured someone, given that we still don't know the exact effects of the globes. It was an attack."

Syles shrugged at him and went on as though his opinion were unimportant. And Potter was still watching her, _smiling_. Draco turned to study the marble hearth, the only thing in Syles's home that spoke of any taste, with its delicate blue patterns and sharp classical lines, and listened to the conversation with only half an ear.

"I was envisioning my mother," Syles said. "She died when I was young, and I only knew her from my father's stories about her. But I could see her just the way she must have been. Pretty, you know, and young." Another flip of her hands, as Draco could see from the corner of his eye. He turned his head further away. "She looked at me and smiled, and then she told me that I could be with her, and have her alive again, if I just found the key to the globes."

Potter went still. Draco watched him again in turn. Yes, this must be something connected to his visions of Vane, something he hadn't mentioned when Draco questioned him. Draco felt his lips draw up. _This is something else we need to discuss, clearly._

"And do you know what that meant?" Potter asked quietly. "Did you want to take the globe home, keep it?"

"Those are two different questions," Syles said, and cocked her head at him with a sharp smile that made her look like a squirrel. Draco relaxed a little against the back of the couch. "But yes, I wanted to keep it. And no, I didn't know what she meant. But I thought I might, if I just studied it a bit longer." She chewed the nearest part of her lip, and Draco sniffed. Syles swung around to face him. "Stop _doing that_."

"I don't know what you mean," Draco said, lifting his eyebrows. Potter was looking at him, too, and Draco relaxed his shoulders again before he remembered that he had reason to be irritated with his partner. "I didn't intend to express contempt of you, Miss Syles. I simply wondered whether you had any more concrete information to give us."

Syles studied him, and then Potter, and gave him a most _annoying _smirk before she shook her head. Draco hoped his smirks had never looked like that back at Hogwarts. If they had, he could see why Potter had remained his enemy for so long. "No. But I do think—do you have to arrest him? If he's just going around showing people visions of the dead, what has he done wrong? I don't think you have to arrest him."

"Our duty is to make sure of that distinction, between those we must arrest and those we need not," Draco said smoothly, before Potter could say something romantic or sympathetic or irritating, or, knowing him, all three at once. "We will find Alexander, and learn from that whether we must arrest him. Your information can help us make the decision."

Syles, as he had known she would, seemed pleased to have that more active role. She settled back with a small smile and a nod that seemed to dismiss them, along with the flick of her fingers, as someone royal would dismiss a peasant. "Very well. You should find out as soon as possible whether he's harmless or not, then."

"We will," Potter said, bowing over her hand, and giving her a smile Draco was glad of, since it was much more charming than his would have been. Draco cocked his head, wondering if Potter would kiss her hand, but Potter drew back long before his lips could have touched the skin. "May we contact you again if we need more information about your experience?"

Draco bit his tongue to say that they didn't need to ask _permission, _they were _Aurors. _But of course they did need to ask if they could talk to a witness who was implicated in no criminal activity. Much as it would have cheered his heart to find out that Syles's mannerisms came from guilt, he doubted it.

"Of course," Syles said, and then jerked her chin at Draco. "Although you could leave the sulky one at home, Auror Potter, and come by yourself."

Draco kept his hand away from his wand. He was _proud _of the control that kept his hand away from his wand. He stared above Syles's head in the direction of the wall, and let his eyes unfocus as he thought of the painting of icy lakes that had hung on his mother's bedroom wall at the Manor. He remembered watching it when he was a child, marveling at the deep blue and green and purple colors that could occur in white ice, and tracing the drifting of the bergs back and forth on the currents with a finger.

He must be like those icebergs if he could. Cool and deep and quiet, with most of himself hidden beneath the surface. It would be the only way he could work, he feared, on the rest of this case.

"Ooh, have I hurt his feelings?" Syles whispered, and smirked on the last words as though she wouldn't be satisfied until Draco cursed her.

* * *

Harry might not understand exactly why Syles had annoyed Malfoy before this, but _now _he did. He shook his head and moved in front of her, shielding her from Malfoy's eyes. He turned to face his partner as he did so, though, because at least part of what annoyed Malfoy seemed to be Harry spending too much attention on Syles.

"I think we should leave," he said. "We won't get anything productive done here, and we have what we need from her."

They were out of the house before Malfoy looked at him. Harry swallowed at the color of his eyes, such a deep and icy blue that he would have hardly believed they usually looked grey. Then he shook himself. _Since when have you started paying attention to the color of your partner's eyes?_

He could remember the color of Lionel's, of course, and all the better since he had had that recent dream—

_No. Vision. Syles was right about that much, that it was more like a vision than a dream. It was so real, a glimpse into some other place—_

And then his breathing stopped as he thought about that, and put it together with some of the other words Lionel had spoken, and he had to hit himself in the chest to start his breathing again.

"Potter?" Malfoy had one hand on his arm, his eyes so bright that they resembled grey seas again. Harry smiled at him, and he knew it was a shaky smile, and that he would have to account for it somehow.

He held the tender suspicion in his mind for a moment, and turned it around, and found it hard to let go no matter how much it would probably be better if he did. "I'm all right," he said aloud, but inside his head, his mind chattered like a million frogs in springtime.

_What if I could make the vision real, the way Lionel said I could? What if I could find a way to a world where Lionel never died?_

He had to put that glorious, overwhelming thought into storage along with all the rest of the thoughts he couldn't let himself think in front of Malfoy, though, at least for a while. It was a treasure to be hoarded and looked over and cradled and held at arm's length because he could hardly believe it was true.

_And it might not be. We still don't understand everything about the globes. We still don't know that they have a benevolent purpose instead of a malevolent one._

"Potter."

Malfoy hovered over Harry when he glanced up, and his eyes had acquired a sheen to them that Harry had seen several times since the Alto case and hated to see in them. His hand found its way to Malfoy's and squeezed, and Malfoy leaned against him hard for a moment and closed his eyes.

"It's all right," Harry said quietly. "Only I think I may have figured out what the globes do." He couldn't keep the secret _all _to himself, not when there might be some people Alexander had attacked, and Malfoy would be angry if he found out Harry had lied. But Harry could—just cherish the dream for a while, surely, before he had to give it up? Before he had to expose it to Malfoy's relentless eyes and Malfoy told him Lionel was dead?

Which—Harry knew, of course. Which was _true. _But there was a difference between ordinarily true, which was the kind of dull hurt that Harry dealt with every day, and Malfoy-true, which glared as if made of diamonds.

Malfoy's hand tightened on his arm to the point of pain. Harry shook off the ridiculous fantasies that clung to him and said, "Yes. I think the globes give the people they strike dreams of an intense time in their past—or an alternate universe where things went differently. There's no reason that Lionel _had _to die. There's no reason that Syles's mother _had _to die. It wasn't destined, or fated. It just happened."

Malfoy grunted slowly. Then he said, "But not everyone who touched a globe that Alexander left behind had those dreams. The Aurors who handled them, and the Unspeakables who took their photographs for the file, certainly didn't. How do you square that with you and Syles having the dreams?"

Harry paused. Then he offered a weak grin. "We both lost our mothers at a young age?" he asked.

Malfoy would have grinned at that on some occasions, or at least returned the small, chilly smile he used when he didn't want to show something as vulgar and low-bred as _amusement_. This time, he only shook his head.

"No jokes, Potter," he said quietly. "No games. I don't want to hear it. I want an _answer_, and I don't want you taking unnecessary risks."

"Well, obviously," Harry said. "But to you, most risks are unnecessary. I'm only trying to come up with reasons that I think work, and I didn't think of the fact that other people hadn't had those dreams. Damn." He flexed his arm in Malfoy's grasp, hoping his partner would take the hint, but Malfoy only tightened his hold and looked as if he could keep on holding Harry that way for hours, if he needed to. "So. The next obvious step. Talk with the rest of the witnesses who had a strange reaction to the globes?"

"Yes," Malfoy said, and turned to one side as though he would lead the way. He was finally forced to drop Harry's hand, which cheered Harry up. He tried not to rub his wrist as he followed Malfoy, though; the git was always so sensitive to signs that he'd hurt Harry, since the torture.

"Let me guess," he told Malfoy's back, when he just kept striding along Syles's street, instead of checking for an Apparition point. "The next person with an odd reaction to the globes lives somewhere around here."

"Yes, and I know him," Malfoy said, and turned to the side and knocked on the door of a smart house that made Harry smile. _Aunt Petunia would groan in envy if she saw it. _The walls were perfectly balanced stone, without a sign of mortar, as if the owner had simply raised great boulders carved in the desired shape from the earth. The garden in front had flowers that stood in precise lines, as if they wouldn't dream of growing across into another's furrow. They were all painfully straight lines in shape, too, Harry noted. No climbing plants for this Slytherin.

Or was he a Slytherin? When the man opened the door, Harry didn't see the look he'd come to expect when Malfoy was greeting someone who had shared his House at Hogwarts: a slight narrowing of the eyes and a gesture of the head that was neither nod nor shake, as if they wanted the option to accept and deny at once. He was tall, and had long dark hair to his shoulders, and an air of permanent sleepiness around his eyes.

"So," the man said, and paused, as though waiting for Malfoy to fill in the blanks. Malfoy gave him the look a long, elegant horse might give when someone invited it to run on a muddy track, and the man grinned and gave in. "Malfoy," he said, holding out his hand. "It's been a long time."

"Not long enough, some would say," Malfoy said, shaking the man's hand and looking as if he would wipe his fingers on his trousers.

The man laughed easily. Harry felt an ache in his chest as he watched him. He wished he could have a bond like that with Malfoy, make him laugh instead of hesitate and stare into space. Perhaps things would be better between them after they had one of their joint sessions together with Mind-Healer Estillo. Harry did know that Malfoy seemed glad Harry had told him about the vision of Lionel right away after he had it.

"Tolliver Stuart," he added, seeing Harry's stare. "I was in Hufflepuff, which is one of the reasons Malfoy here barely condescends to acknowledge me. Unfortunately for him, I have more money than his father ever saw at one time in one place, so he has to nod to me as having some worth."

"Your House placement was wrong," Malfoy said, and brushed past Stuart into the house. Harry hesitantly followed, after a glance at Stuart to make sure he was welcome. Stuart nodded, smiling, and then leaned in to whisper in Harry's ear as he passed him.

"He always says things like that. But he doesn't mean them. You must have noticed that by now if you're still working together."

Harry tried not to bristle. Was the man saying that Malfoy made a deliberate effort not to get along with his partners? As far as Harry knew, Malfoy had worked with the same man, Kellen Moonborn, for four years, until he died on the Sussex Necromancer case, while Harry had drifted between three partners in the same time period.

But Stuart grinned at him, and then nodded at Malfoy, who had turned around in the middle of what seemed to be an enormous kitchen without beginning or end except the door they'd come through, and was waiting for them. He was near enough to hear the whisper, and he would have said something—Harry hoped he would have said something—if it offended him. He inclined his head stiffly at Stuart and said, "Explain about the globes."

Stuart leaned against the nearest table, one of about four made of pretty, pale wood, and grinned again. "Aren't you supposed to introduce yourselves as Aurors first and tell me that I have a choice to talk, but that my explanation would help your investigation and bring criminals to justice?"

"You know why we're here." Malfoy's voice had a tint like new-fallen snow on top of it, but Harry was sure it must be a cover for amusement, that they shared some deeper bond, that Stuart wouldn't stand there and grin back at him if Malfoy was as angry at him as that tone seemed to say he was…

_Good God, are you jealous?_

Harry was glad that both Malfoy and Stuart were focused on each other at the moment, so that his whole-body flinch went unnoticed. He didn't have the right to feel like that. He _knew _he didn't have the right to feel like that. Even if Malfoy had slept with men in the past, he had just broken up with his fiancée, who had committed an impulsive, practically sociopathic murder, and he felt isolated and alone. And the Alto case had come between them since the start of their partnership and scarred them further.

And there was Lionel. If Harry stood a chance of winning Lionel back, or being with him in a different world, then he didn't have to feel jealous. Malfoy had not been the great love of his life, or the one whose death had cast Harry into depression that was only now lifting, through his mind-sessions with Healer Estillo. Six months ago, Harry had known that Malfoy was an Auror, but hadn't worked with him or talked to him in years. Lionel had been the center of his universe.

_Why should it always stay the same?_

_ Why shouldn't it, if I can have him back, _Harry answered savagely, and went back to listening to the actual conversation.

"And I picked up the globe because it was lying on the ground, it was pretty, and no one told me better," Stuart was finishing.

Malfoy folded his arms and sneered. "Why am I not surprised? You would have picked up the Dark Lord's snake if it wasn't too heavy for you to lift."

For the first time, Stuart looked halfway sober. He pushed his hair out of his eyes and shook his head. "I wish you wouldn't joke about things like that, Draco," he said quietly. "The war is over, but we still have our brands from it." He turned his left arm to the side, in a posture that probably would have meant nothing to someone without Harry's particular history, but he had that history, and it did.

He caught his breath, and looked harder at Stuart than he meant to. So he had been a Death Eater, too.

Malfoy glared at him. Harry could practically hear the words filtering through the mental connection that Malfoy liked to pretend they shared in times of intense emotion, and then was perfectly ready to forget about in other times. _Don't ask him._

Harry wouldn't have asked, but he had other questions he needed to know the answer to. "Did you have intense visions when you picked up the globe?" he asked. "Dreams that night of something you wanted to have, and now actually had the chance to have, never mind how? Did you see and speak to someone who told you the globes were real, and the key to understanding them was to study them?"

Stuart whirled to face him. "I never put that in the official report I made," he said sharply. "How did you know that?"

"Because that's what happened to me," Harry said. "Look, can you tell us the details of your dreams? I didn't know you had them until I saw your reaction just now."

Stuart folded his arms and eyed Harry. Harry could see the pinched lines around his mouth and thought he understood why Malfoy might have had something in common with him, even without that Death Eater past. He bit his lip so he wouldn't say that aloud and tried to look innocent, which just made Malfoy glare at him harder.

"Very well," Stuart said at last. "But if I'm going to tell you about those frankly mental dreams—which I didn't even think were connected to the globe I touched at first—then I'm going to need a drink." He faced a cupboard in the nearest wall and gestured sharply down with his hand.

Harry was standing close enough to see that there was no wand in that hand, only the empty fingers, but the door of the cupboard flew open and one of the drinks inside—in a distinctly Muggle can—flew out, skimmed the distance, and slammed into Stuart's palm. He took a drink and stalked in the direction of what must be non-kitchen somewhere in the house.

"I didn't realize he was powerful enough to do wandless magic," Harry murmured as he passed Malfoy on his way to follow Stuart. He could usually sense someone's level of power on first meeting, though it certainly wasn't infallible.

Malfoy's lip twitched. "I've never known him to be," he said. "But he could have practiced that spell, if he used it a lot, until he could do it wandlessly." He glanced at Harry. "And it's not as though you have much room to speak against someone having a weird magical ability."

Harry opened his mouth, then shut it again.

"Yes?" Malfoy bent towards him solicitously.

"I…nothing," Harry said. He had caught hold of the thread of a thought, but it vanished, trailing tauntingly, as he tried to catch it. He shook his head and prepared himself for a conversation with a potentially hostile witness, all the while wondering when the thought would come back. It was something important, something about Alexander and Stuart and the globes and Malfoy's words, but he couldn't hold it now.


	4. Loyalty and Jealousy

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Four—Loyalty and Jealousy_

"You have to understand that I haven't told anyone else about this."

Stuart's voice was low, his eyes cutting back and forth between Harry and Draco as though he assumed they would split up and come at him from different directions. Harry kept his posture relaxed against the enormous black couch Stuart had finally led them to, in the middle of his even more enormous drawing room. This wasn't his fight, or his conversation. Stuart would be appealing mainly to Malfoy. Let him make his appeal there, then.

Malfoy didn't seem inclined to take it more seriously than Harry, though, and utterly let down his end of the Stuart-questioning task. He sipped at the tea Stuart had handed him and said nothing, his mouth set into an implacable line.

Stuart stared at him for a little while, then uttered a gusty sigh and continued on. "When I was ten, I lost my aunt. She was the only one who really encouraged me to do anything but study to be the perfect pure-blood heir. I knew there was a wider world out there, but my parents wouldn't show it to me, and you can't build a life and knowledge of reality off the small hints I could get. But my aunt let me read the right books, and introduced me to a few children who didn't fit the uptight mold of the ones my parents encouraged me to play with. She was the only one who _cared_." His face softened and grew bright, as if the light from a distant sunset was playing over it.

Harry bit his lip to stop himself from reacting with a cry of sympathy. After all, the man in front of him had been a Death Eater, and he didn't know that it was from motives like the ones Malfoy had had, either, to save his family. The only thing Harry could possibly do right now was reserve judgment.

"I had all the toys I could want, and all the books I could want as long as they weren't about Muggleborns or Muggles, and all the racing brooms, and the owls, and the dress robes," Stuart continued. "But she was the only one who _cared_. Who showed me other things. Who taught me about the way that I'd have to become if I wanted to survive."

He paused to take a swig out of the can, and then leaned forwards with his hands dangling between his knees. It was a posture that Ron took, a lot of the time. Harry frowned, and again reminded himself that he couldn't show too much sympathy to someone who might lie to them, according to the way Malfoy sat coiled, just because he resembled Harry's best friend.

"When I touched the globe, I saw her again, and the way she _really _was, not the way I thought she was when I was a child."

"And she was a disappointment, I take it?" Malfoy's voice had that glittering ice-rime on it again that Harry had heard before when he disappointed him.

Stuart gave him a look strong enough to make Harry's hand tighten on his wand. "You understand _nothing_," Stuart said, and his voice seemed to make the room vibrate. "But I reckon that's not unusual, since every relative you have either despises you or you despise them."

Malfoy's face whitened, but Harry only noticed because he was looking directly at him. He tensed, ready to spring to his feet if Malfoy wanted Harry to defend him, but then thought about it. Malfoy could make a cutting remark of his own if he wanted to put Stuart in his place. If he _didn't _really react, then he probably didn't want the Stuarts of the world to know what he was feeling.

Harry leaned back against the couch and wished he had accepted a cup of tea when it was offered, if only so he would have something to do with his hands. Stuart looked at him, and Harry smiled back. Unlike the whiteness of Malfoy's face, that made Stuart shift in place and look away.

"I didn't know her," he said. "Not really. My memories faded because I was a kid, and also because I went to Hogwarts the next year and started living the way that she had told me I always could. But now I saw how intelligent and vital she really was. The place we met was her house, but with rooms that I never got to see inside and had only heard described after her death. I don't—it was more than a dream. More than a vision, even. Somehow the globe that Alexander left behind _took _me there."

"And you want to go back," Harry said, after a glance at Malfoy to make sure that he didn't want to handle the interrogation of this witness by himself. "More than you've ever wanted anything."

Stuart stared at him, and his tongue darted out to moisten his lips a moment later. "Yeah," he said hoarsely. "How did you—how did you know?"

"Because that's the way I feel about the vision I had," Harry said, and felt Malfoy's attention shift to him. Well, that wasn't a problem. Malfoy wasn't going to accost him about something private in front of a hostile witness like Stuart, and meanwhile Harry could watch Stuart for signs of anything important. "The person I fell in love with last year was there, and promised me we could be together if I learned the key to the globes."

"My aunt didn't actually promise me that," Stuart admitted. "Just said there was a locked door, and a key that fit it, and if I could find the key and fit it into the lock, then I could open the door and come to her."

"And that is the dangerous part," Malfoy drawled, leaning back in his chair and fixing his eyes on the ceiling. "Do neither of you see that? The dream-worlds he promises do not exist, and if they did and you could cross into them, what would you do about the people remaining in the world behind you?"

Harry turned to him as he finished, because he couldn't help it, and so saw the spear-like glance that Malfoy threw at him, felt the way it pierced his body. He winced, and lowered his head. Then he lifted it again, because if Malfoy could only bring up subtle hints in front of Stuart, then Harry was free to pretend to ignore them. He wasn't subtle in the same way that Malfoy was, after all.

"I wouldn't want to give up the ability to return, no," Stuart said with some composure, and lifted the Muggle can to his mouth again. Malfoy's hands curled inwards like ravens' claws while Stuart made him wait. Harry winced and winced to himself, wondering if Stuart knew how lucky he was that Malfoy had the patience to wait like this. Of course, perhaps it wouldn't matter, since Malfoy wouldn't take out his temper on _Stuart_.

"But my aunt didn't say that I had to," Stuart went on, lowering his can. "There must be some way into the world where she dwells, and that's what I want to find. The bridge there and back again." He spoke with a faint smile, but the burning in his eyes made Harry lean still further back into the couch.

"These people are dead," Malfoy said. "Both Stuart's aunt and your lover, Potter." Though it was no more than the continuation of the deception he had begun himself, really, Harry still felt a flash of absurd gratitude to hear Malfoy call Lionel his lover. It connected them in a way, and made it seem less like the connection had only been Harry's absurd, one-sided crush. "Why do you think the vision is of another world? Why not a dream, a hallucination?"

"It was vivid," Stuart whispered. "You didn't see the colors of the tapestries on her walls."

Harry thought of the way the grass had crushed under his feet as he walked with Lionel, and privately agreed.

"Hallucinations are often vividly-colored," said Malfoy, and there was no smile in his voice now. Harry waited a moment before he turned towards him, in fear of what he might see. Malfoy gripped the edges of the cushion he sat on, and his eyes shone, but not in a way that would have made Harry want to go near him if he saw him from a distance. "I lived for years with people whose delusions had the power to change every color in the world. I won't live with more of them."

"That hardly matters to me, does it?' Stuart drawled, and drained the can he held. "I know what I saw, and I know why it's real."

Malfoy turned his head and pinned Harry with his eyes. Harry swallowed. He had felt nothing like this since some of the moments when he spoke with Lionel and tried to make him understand Harry's feelings, or at least trust him again, since he couldn't return them. Not even that was as intense as this.

_This warning is meant for me._

Harry looked down and forced a little lightness into his voice. "We might never find the path to those worlds, but we know that we should look for them, that we have to look for them. After all, how else can we understand what Alexander is doing, and stop it?" _There, _he thought. _That's a good argument, and Malfoy can stop looking at me now like I'm a traitor to whatever beliefs he has._

"We must understand what he is doing," Malfoy said, and smiled charmingly, his lips curling. "We must understand what every Dark wizard we hunt is doing, and stop it. But becoming caught up in their games will avail us nothing."

And now Harry had no choice but to meet his eyes. He knew Malfoy was thinking of Healer Alto, and how he had fallen victim to her power without ever meaning to, and a pleasant little shiver danced over his skin. Perhaps he shouldn't, but after a partner who couldn't care less what he thought and then Lionel who Harry cared about too much, it was nice to have someone show that the things he'd done to Harry under Alto's control, and Harry's forgiveness for it, still mattered so much to him.

"I'm afraid I've told you all I can," Stuart said abruptly, dragging them out of their little drama. And Harry could hardly blame him, when it must have been boring to sit there and watch him and Malfoy stare into each other's eyes. "Is there anything else you wanted to ask me?"

Malfoy turned to him and shook his head. "We know where to find you if we have questions," he murmured.

It was a standard Auror closing line, but Stuart must have taken it as a threat, because his face darkened and he half-rose from the chair. Then he glanced at Harry, fake-laughed, and dropped back. "Yes, you do," he said. "In the home that I built with my own money that my parents were kind enough to give me when I said that I might want it."

Harry at least knew why _that _made Malfoy go into the kind of stillness that was the opposite of a visible flinch; his parents had abandoned him when he chose to become an Auror. But he couldn't do much but scowl at Stuart in warning, and the way Stuart looked at him with half-lidded eyes, the wrath of Harry Potter was the last thing he was concerned about. Sometimes Harry wished he didn't have the reputation of being caring and compassionate to everyone but Dark wizards.

_If you knew some of what I could do, _he thought in Stuart's direction, and hoped that the emotions showed in his eyes at the same time as he also hoped they didn't, so that Stuart would have nothing to act against him for. _If you hurt him…_

"Call off your attack dog, Malfoy," Stuart said, and turned his head away. "I've done nothing but speak perfectly ordinary words to you, and answer you with all the politeness you deserve."

Harry felt himself flush, and bit his lips so he wouldn't say something. Whatever he _did _say would probably only make it worse for Malfoy. Malfoy, by the way he reached out and lightly touched Harry's wrist, seemed to agree.

"Come, Harry," he murmured. "We know where he lives, and we know his wealth. But he doesn't know ours, does he?"

Harry looked at Malfoy, blinking. Normally, he would never use Harry's first name outside the office, and never for something this…unimportant. To hold him back from scowling at a witness? Malfoy would content himself with looks. Not a word and a touch. They were too vulgar, too intimate.

But Malfoy was looking at him now, and from the step closer he made, Harry was suddenly reminded of the way Malfoy had acted in the Healer's office. As if Harry deserved some new protection, more than usual, at least.

Harry felt his stomach clench with something that could have been nausea but felt more like warmth, and smiled cautiously at Malfoy. Then he faced Stuart and bowed to him. "Sorry for causing you trouble, Mr. Stuart," he said. "And thank you for answering our questions."

Stuart's face took on a light flush as he sought for some way to interpret that, but Malfoy had a hand on Harry's back and was guiding him towards the door by then. Harry sighed, resisted the urge to lean against that hand, and waited until they were outside before he turned to Malfoy to ask, "What's the next step? Back to Leah's shop, I suppose?"

_I have to find out if the Lionel I saw in the dream was real. If the way to get there was real._

He did have to, he thought, ignoring the deep-searching way Malfoy stared at him. No matter what the result was of their investigation, if Alexander turned out to be truly twisted or not, Harry had to find out the reality of that dream, so he could lay it to rest and move on his with his life, the way Malfoy had appealed to him to do.

Or he had to find a way into it, and explore the reality, and see Lionel's eyes looking at him the way he had always wished they would look at him. One reality or another.

* * *

_Has Potter started to think the vision was real? _

Draco restrained himself from asking. He had already given away more than he wanted to, with that little act where his hand had landed on Harry's back and he had called him by his first name instead of Potter. Draco was sure that Potter hadn't seen the way Stuart's eyes narrowed, or wouldn't have known what that meant if he did see, but he wouldn't put it past Stuart to watch them out his window, either.

"Back to Eleanor's Enchantments," he agreed, and turned to lead the way.

Facing them, in the shadow of a great, tentacled creature that Draco remembered from some of his fever dreams as a boy, was Alexander.

Draco shielded at once, and stepped in front of Harry, who had surged forwards as if he thought it was his task to stop Alexander and his nightmares all at the same time. Draco raised shields around Harry, too, while Alexander's hand snapped out and two more globes flew from them. One of them hit the shields in front of Harry and exploded.

The other passed through the shields in front of Draco as if they weren't there.

Draco dropped to one knee and rolled, left arm tucked closely in to his body. For some reason, a thought that burned and crackled through his mind like a storm, it seemed especially important to protect his left arm.

But Alexander didn't try to hit him again, and when he sat up and looked around, blinking, Draco realized that he was gone. The nightmares had gone with him, those things half-glimpsed and better left unseen.

"Draco! Are you all right?"

Harry was stooping over him, and the clarity in his eyes was everything that Draco could have desired, but had rarely seen, since the confrontation with Alto. He nodded and spent another moment scanning the street. Alexander had a habit of appearing out of thin air, it seemed, and vanishing as abruptly. He wouldn't put it past him to appear behind Harry's back and strike with a globe at him.

Already, his mind was working on the possible reasons that his own shields might have failed. Harry's greater power? Because Alexander had already hit Harry with one globe and wished to target Draco this time? Draco shook his head. Those were plausible reasons, but not ones that he could _know _were true without some extensive work in a training room or with magical theory.

_And preferably one of the globes._

He looked at the street to see whether any were left, and cursed softly when he saw only small glass shards and what looked like a scattering of fairy dust. Perhaps the Unspeakables would have some in their custody.

"Draco! Will you _answer _me?"

Draco glanced up with his eyebrows lifted. Harry scowled at him as if he hadn't seen Draco's nod. Well, perhaps he hadn't. Draco had noticed before this that Harry didn't pay attention to gesture as much as words.

_Except the times that he wants to pay attention to the gestures, of course, or wants to find someone to blame for his own lack of attention._

Saying so would start an argument they had no time for and probably couldn't finish. Draco curbed his temper with sharp reins, and said, "I'm all right. The globe didn't touch me. However, I think this proves that they're more dangerous than we anticipated. Alexander used them as weapons, and on _us _this time, with no chance that he meant to strike at Leah. Are you still so confident that your vision of Lionel is a good thing, Potter?"

Potter stared past him with his lips parted, his eyes rapt. Draco turned around swiftly, but saw no gateway to another world appearing in the middle of the pavement. He sighed. _Pity. This is the time that I would be tempted to shove Potter through it._

"Potter?" he said, and snapped his fingers in front of Harry's face.

With a snap of his neck and head, Harry seemed to come back to himself. Then he frowned. "I saw you cast your shields perfectly," he said. "I'm sure there was no weakness in them that Alexander could have exploited. But then, we don't know a lot about the globes or what Alexander's associated gifts might be. We need to go back and talk to Leah again."

"Agreed," Draco said.

He did keep one eye on Potter as they began to move down the street in the direction of the designated Apparition point. It was one thing to have a revelation, and it might be that Potter had had one. It was another way to look as he had then, as if…

_As if the thing he most dearly wanted was in arms' reach._

* * *

Harry spent the afternoon trying to convince himself it was a trick of the light. He had a lot of time to think about that, since going to Eleanor's Enchantments meant they found it shut up, and Leah's neighbors said they had no idea when she would return. So there was nothing for it but to return to the office and do paperwork. Even the Ministry's problem children, like Harry, had to do paperwork sometimes; not filing it was a bigger sin than occasionally violating the rules.

He had _not _seen Lionel rise from the tumbled chaos that the shattered globes had made on the street. Not _really_. He had not seen Lionel's hand stretched out, or his eyes big and yearning the way they had been in his vision of that other world, or his arms wide as if he wanted to embrace Harry.

Harry glanced sideways at Draco, absurdly absorbed in the composition of a report. Harry wondered if he knew that his lips moved, silently spelling complicated words, when he was like that.

_No. And he would deny it if I told him. Malfoys wouldn't do anything so plebeian as to move their lips. _Despite his parents turning their backs on him, Draco was still more Malfoy, in some ways, than he had been in school.

And Harry, having been more defiantly magical in the Dursleys' house than ever after he had started Hogwarts, could understand that.

He shook his head and dragged his eyes back to his paper. None of this was helping him figure out what he should write down for the next line in the report, and Merlin knew he had to write down _something._

Or helping him figure out whether he had really seen Lionel this afternoon.

_At least I have my own private Draco-voice in my head to help me figure out what he would say about this, _Harry thought, and rolled his eyes, after another check on Draco to make sure that he wasn't looking Harry's way. _Delusion, hallucination, obsession. Those are all words he's already used about Lionel. I can't expect him to understand this._

That was the problem, wasn't it? Harry had come to know it was a bad thing when he lied to Draco, and that included lying about these visions that the globe hitting him might have caused. On the other hand, Draco was hardly more encouraging when Harry _did _tell the truth. It always came down to how something wasn't right with Harry, either his intelligence or his perceptions. Draco gave Harry the impression that he had already thought all the interesting thoughts, and when they passed through Harry's brain, they were second-hand and used-up.

Harry grimaced and rubbed his face. _Careful, that could turn into resentment. _

And that was another thing. Why in the world did his mind keep drifting to Draco when he wanted to think about _Lionel?_

Harry sat bolt upright and scattered several sheets of parchment on the floor. He bent down to retrieve them, moving like an automaton, and glad for the excuse to avoid Draco as he glanced towards him.

He—he had thought like this, once, during meetings and exchanges of files and reprimands by his superiors. His mind had always strayed, and he had dismissed the warnings he received and the suggestions that might have made him a better Auror in the mold of people like Okazes, because he had had something better to think about.

Lionel.

And now, Draco.

Harry shut his eyes and shivered. He didn't—want—he didn't—he couldn't—

And then determination seeped into him, so strong that it seemed for a moment as if he were floating in the midst of a sea of it.

He'd made mistakes handling his crush on Lionel (_Draco would probably say that the biggest one was having it at all_), and that gave him warning about how to act if it turned out that he really did have a crush on Draco now. He had to think of the man as his partner first and a potential lover second. He had to stop being disappointed that Draco was straight; he had probably only seen Draco as flirting with Stuart earlier this afternoon because he was so desperate to see _anything _that would suggest Draco was bent. He had to make sure not to moon around after Draco and let it interrupt their work.

And he had to make sure that he never, ever told him. Giving one straight partner reason to doubt and hate him was quite enough.

"Potter? You all right? I didn't know you were that unnerved by our appointment."

Draco was standing by his desk. Harry was proud of the way he let his eyes rise to Draco's face without stopping at the points of interest in between his waist and his throat. "What do you mean? What appointment?"

Draco's teeth flashed. "Why, our first joint session with Mind-Healer Estillo, of course!"

Harry managed not to let his head fall into his hands, but only barely.

_I'm doomed._


	5. Qualities of Mind

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Five—Qualities of Mind_

"Welcome, Auror Potter, Auror Malfoy. Please do have a seat."

Mind-Healer Estillo spoke without glancing up from the paperwork in front of her. Harry had never seen her when she didn't have at least one teetering stack of it on her desk. He winced and took a seat, wondering as he did so whether he would make one of the generous piles in front of her or off to the sides, on the other seats, slide to the floor. Draco sat next to him, and tucked his robes around him as neatly as a cat wrapping its tail around its paws. Harry felt a brief ache of envy. _He _could never do things like that.

Estillo continued to work with her head bowed. Harry studied her. She had long white hair, braided back, but so few lines in her face that he had never really known how old she was, and hadn't felt comfortable asking. Now and then she tapped her finger against her lips and then continued writing. Her hand was fast and smooth and easy, and Harry had envied it the first time he saw it. Now, after several weeks of receiving owls from her that reminded him of appointments and seeing the file she kept on him, he would have been happy never to write like that, if it meant he could stop _seeing _it.

Draco shot a glance at him. Harry stared back, wondering what he had done wrong, and then realized his foot was tapping. He pressed down with his other foot on top of it to make it stop. Draco sniffed and faced the Healer again.

"Now," Estillo said, and shoved away the file she'd been working on exactly as if it wasn't important. Harry had asked her why she did things like that during their first appointment, and she'd chatted away to him until he tried to ask her another question, at which point she asked why he was so much more eager to talk about what she was doing than what _he _was doing.

Harry turned his head to the side. Of course, that attracted the Healer's attention. They were most interested in _reluctant _prey, Harry thought. He had never seen them treat an Auror like that who came to their offices willingly.

"You wanted your session with me together this time," Estillo said, when Draco had sat there for some minutes in comfortable silence and Harry in uncomfortable. "Did you both agree to this? Do you know what sensitive material might be discussed?"

Harry mumbled something. Draco met her eyes and gave a firm nod. Harry scowled at Draco's shoulders. He wished he could do something like that, but he had too many secrets to protect—including the one he had realized a few minutes ago, and now had to hold against his chest like an egg to keep from getting crushed.

"Auror Potter?"

Harry sighed and met Healer Estillo's eyes. "Yes, I agreed," he said. "You don't need to worry about that."

Estillo cocked her head and gave him a faint smile. Her eyes were grey, like Draco's, but not as clear—and Harry bit his tongue as he realized what he was thinking. It was exactly the sort of soppy nonsense that he used to think about Lionel. Or at least Draco would characterize it as soppy nonsense, which made it another of the many things that Harry didn't think he could share with him.

"What else should I worry about, then?" Estillo asked quietly.

"What?" Harry ran a hand through his hair, and wondered whether either Estillo or Draco would understand if he asked to be excused from the appointment. Probably not, he decided in some resignation. He could avoid Estillo for a time, but then along would come one of those neat little notes, and Draco would smile and ask questions with hard eyes.

"You implied that I don't need to worry about your agreement," Estillo said. "What _should _I worry about? What is troubling you?"

Harry bit his tongue. He badly needed to be somewhere else, he thought, doing something else. He needed time to work through his feelings about Draco—_Malfoy, _he should be calling him that if he wanted emotional distance from him—and space to exercise or do something else that would let the pain out. The pain, the wonder, the desire, the fear. All of those were dashing around in the middle of his head and making things hard. He had taken a Calming Draught the other times he'd come to see Estillo, but there hadn't been time for that before Draco hauled him out of the office.

Estillo clasped her hands in front of her, prepared to wait until the earth cracked open and swallowed Harry, the way he sort of wished it would right at the moment. And Draco's eyes just grew harder and harder, brighter and brighter, shining like the sun.

Harry swallowed. "So, all right," he whispered. "This case we're on. It's given me dreams of my old partner."

"The one whose death hurt you so badly," Estillo said, her voice full of flowing gentleness.

"The one he was," Draco began, and then stopped and looked at him. Because Harry hadn't told Estillo about being in love with Lionel, and Harry hardly thought Draco in a hurry to share that information, either, if only because it would challenge Draco's exclusive possession of it.

"Yes," Harry said, and raised an eyebrow at Draco that he hoped would communicate he really didn't want to talk in detail about Lionel in front of Estillo. Draco's mouth lowered into the lines of a frown, and Harry shrugged. His choice to tell how much he wanted Estillo to know, and yes, it probably _would _help if he gave more detail about Lionel, because that meant she would have more options for helping him, but it would hurt more right now to talk about it than to keep it hidden. "I want to know—I saw a vision. He promised me that there's another world where he's alive. The vision felt vivid and intense, more real than a dream. But how can I know if it is? And how can I trust my perceptions on this case? I need to think about the case, not about Lionel, but he's all I can focus on." Harry closed his eyes and tugged hard on his fringe, in case that would help.

"Perhaps it would help to place the memory in a Pensieve?" Estillo murmured. She had suggested that several times before, and Harry had agreed to let her watch the memories of some hard cases he'd worked on, and the reprimands Okazes had given him that meant he didn't trust the Ministry.

Now, though, the thought of what would happen if Estillo and Draco saw that vision made Harry spring to his feet. "No," he said tightly.

"Calm down, Potter." Draco's hand settled onto Harry's shoulder, firm as the grip of an iceberg. "No one's suggesting that you have to do it right now. Eventually, when you're more comfortable."

Harry nodded reluctantly and sat back down, not looking at Draco. He knew what he would see: those grey eyes gone cold with curiosity. Draco might want to see Lionel, to explore the vision, and Harry knew it would probably help the case and build trust between them.

But he couldn't. Not right now. He would probably crack if he had to listen to another of Draco's speeches right now about how he really hadn't loved Lionel, it was just obsession and a crush. He could listen to them tomorrow. Not today.

"Then something else," Estillo said. "Would you let me give you a more comforting memory? One that is drawn from your past, and that you could hold onto to remind you that there is more than just hardship and pain in the world?"

Harry hesitated. Estillo had suggested this option several times before, but Harry had rejected it, thinking he would look weak to have to hold onto the comfort of a happy memory. Now, though…

Now he thought it would probably settle his mind, and just because Draco was watching didn't mean he would think Harry was weak. He knew something about the kinds of pressures this case was causing for Harry, after all, if not everything.

"Yes," he said. "All right. How are you going to do it?"

Estillo smiled at him and laid her wand across his forehead, over the scar and between his eyes, leading down to the line of his nose. Harry blinked and stopped trying to focus on her wand, which was only causing him to cross his eyes and have a headache. He looked at Draco instead, who was lounging in his chair behind Estillo and had his arms folded and his legs crossed. His expression was so blank that Harry had no idea what he was thinking.

_Perhaps that I'm weak after all._

The thought made Harry straighten his spine with a snap and glare at Draco. Draco blinked lazily at him in return, cocking his head to the side as if to ask Harry what he was doing. Harry turned his head away and listened to Estillo's calm and simple explanation.

"Every Mind-Healer learns how to do this. Happy memories _feel _different than unhappy ones. I'm going to enter your mind, but I won't be able to see the memories, not in the way that I would if I was using Legilimency. I'll just find one that has the right resonance and draw it forwards, all right?"

Harry blinked, a little surprised that he'd understood every word of that as well as the theory behind it. He acquiesced with a shrug and leaned his head back, closing his eyes.

"Now, do sit up straight and keep your eyes open," Estillo admonished him. "It doesn't do much good if you're so relaxed; that causes your memories to feel more alike to me as I search them, even the bad ones."

Harry sighed and did as he was told, even if it meant meeting Malfoy's eyes. At least Malfoy carried on looking exactly the same as Estillo whispered the spell, and she did it softly enough that Harry couldn't even really make out the incantation. Now and then, Malfoy's eyes narrowed as if he suspected something, but Harry didn't see how he could. He kept his eyes firmly open, even when they started watering, and then Estillo reached the end of the incantation and made a whipping motion with her wand as she would if she was drawing a memory from his temple.

The memory seemed to rush forwards; Harry could sense the passage of its motion, like the passage of time, long before it arrived. And then he closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, he was _in_ the memory.

* * *

_Draco had fallen asleep on his desk._

_ Harry hesitated, then rose and made his way over towards him, telling himself that he didn't need to do anything special. He would just make sure that Draco didn't have a crick in his neck or hadn't drooled on an important report._

_ Well. If the last was the case, then he would preserve the report for all eternity, or at least the next week, to show Draco that Malfoys could be careless, too. But he would rescue it from further damage, and then Malfoy would owe him one when he woke up._

_ Harry did indeed find a report under Malfoy's cheek, the ink smeared, though it wasn't in danger from drool yet. Grumbling to himself, with the wordless sounds that he knew he used to use around Ron, he moved the report aside and then conjured a cushion for Draco's cheek instead. Moving his head there turned out to be a less than easy proposition, since Draco's head was heavy and Harry was trying so hard not to wake him up. But at last he was in place, and Harry paused to glance down at Draco._

_ The glance turned into a stare, even though he didn't mean it to._

_ It was less than a week after the time that Healer Alto had taken Draco's mind captive and made him torture Harry, and Harry hadn't thought Draco would fall asleep in the office at all. Not in front of him, the man he probably had to work harder than usual to trust. Yeah, Harry had been the torture victim, but he had still seen something vulnerable in Draco's eyes, and Draco hated showing that to anyone._

_ Yet here he was, his eyes closed and lashes fanned out across his cheeks, his hand open in a helpless half-curl next to him, the fingers still brilliantly stained and splashed with ink. Harry reached down, swallowing, and touched the center of that hand's palm. Draco's fingers curled around his, as reflexive as a baby's._

_ Then Draco stirred and murmured, opening grey eyes with a soft haze of sleep across them, and asked, "What? Harry? Have I been asleep?"_

_ There it was, even more than the fact that Draco had trusted him enough to fall asleep in the office. The wondering undertone to his voice, the half-smirk to his lips, and the use of Harry's first name in the moments before he recovered full consciousness. And the way he held on to Harry's finger._

_ That was happiness._

* * *

Draco first suspected that Estillo's spell hadn't worked the way she expected it to when Harry clenched his eyes shut as if to hold back tears and started rubbing his palms on his trousers. Then he sat up, took a sharp breath, and said with a smile so fake Draco wouldn't have taken it as a gift, "Thank you, Healer Estillo. That worked. I think we can discuss this case now."

The Healer wasn't stupid, though now and then she did things for her own reasons that Draco found hard to follow. This was one of those times. She leaned back on her heels and blinked, studying Harry; then she inclined her head and stood, going back to her desk. "Very well," she said, obviously leaving it alone for now. "Tell me about the case."

Harry flowed into glib speech, of the kind that Draco would have thought he couldn't use when he first partnered with him. But long experience had, by this time, taught him that Harry wasn't stupid. He just didn't see the need to talk like he was smart when he had other people around to do it for him.

Now and then Estillo glanced at Draco and invited him into the conversation that way, but he restricted his contributions to nods and grunts, or short confirmations of the facts Harry had already stated when there was no other escape. Most of the time, he watched Harry.

Watched the way his foot tapped on the floor next to his juddering knee, or how his head bent, or how his hand clasped empty air as if wishing for his wand.

Perhaps this joint session with the Mind-Healer hadn't been the solution to all their problems, but it was already proving more than worthwhile. Draco would have to trick answers out of his partner because Harry didn't trust him enough to talk to him freely. Very well. Then that was what he would do. But he would get what he wanted.

Healer Estillo leaned back in her chair again when Harry was done and propped her feet up on the desk. Draco fought to keep from curling his lip. Sometimes Estillo was prim and proper enough to satisfy even the standards of decorum that his mother had trained into Draco, and sometimes she was vulgar and strained or stained her formal robes by doing something like this.

"I understand," Estillo said, with a faint smile at Harry that suggested she really did. "You fear facing the past, and it unnerved you that the case brought you face-to-face with it without a chance to back away."

"I—that's not exactly it," Harry said, and Draco lifted a hand to his face to hide the smile. Of course it wasn't. Harry would never want to admit to a situation where the word "fear" might apply. Harry darted a brief glare at Draco and then faced Estillo again. "I want to know what's real and what's not. I want to have the chance to put the past behind me if I can. A final conversation with Lionel, a final chance to say all the things that I didn't get to say because I didn't know he would die…that would be what I wanted."

Estillo frowned and cocked her head like someone missing some of the beats to a song. Draco knew why. She didn't know that Harry had been in love with Vane, and that made some of his emotions and his obsessions appear not to make a great deal of sense.

"Auror Malfoy?" she asked, turning to him after a moment when she had given Harry the chance to say something and he hadn't. "Do you have anything to add?"

"Only that my partner is correct in the essentials," Draco said. "We don't yet know what the globes do. He was injured when Alexander cast one at him, and unconscious for several hours. He apparently had a strong vision while unconscious, the way that other witnesses we questioned had. But not everyone has that reaction to the globes, and we don't know why the few who had it did." He glanced at Harry, wondered whether he should say something that Estillo would understand as a hint about Vane but Harry probably wouldn't, and decided not to. He didn't want any setback in their trust if Estillo _did _say something and Harry figured out where her information had come from. "The other witnesses we spoke to had lost some people they loved at a young age. And they reported the same vivid colors and sensations that Auror Potter here did. That at least suggests that the impulse to say good-bye, to make the final farewell more meaningful, is common across the visions and reflects a part of the globes' functioning, though we don't yet know why Alexander wants to give certain people those visions."

Harry smiled at him, radiating relief for anyone who chose to read. Estillo chose, and Draco saw her make a quick note. But Harry, although he turned back at the scratch on the parchment, didn't seem inclined to question what she had written.

"That's about the latest case, then," Estillo said. "Let's talk about other things. Auror Potter, have you made any progress with the memory that we watched last time?"

Harry sat up straight, and this time he looked as if he'd shut all his emotions behind an office door and thrown away the single key. "I haven't," he said. "It's still difficult for me to accept, and—and I don't want to discuss it in front of Auror Malfoy." He all but rushed through the latest words, his hands clamping down on the chair this time.

Draco blinked, then smiled slowly. "Thank you for the honesty," he said. If he _knew _Harry was keeping secrets, and probably ones that were unrelated to the latest case, then he could at least work with that. They were unlikely to cost his life if they didn't spring on him from nowhere and if Harry didn't go to ridiculous lengths to keep their existence concealed.

Harry stared at him. "I thought you would hate that," he said.

"I wanted you to talk about Alexander and your vision of Vane because it could be important to _solving the case_," Draco said, and leaned forwards and let Harry have a glimpse of his face so he would understand how important this was. "I don't want something rising up behind me and biting my head off, perhaps literally, because you couldn't bring yourself to tell me something you thought was personal. But this doesn't have anything to do with Vane? With Alexander? It's something you spoke with Healer Estillo about before the case began?"

Wide-eyed, Harry shook his head and then nodded, pausing as if he didn't know which question he had answered.

"I will testify that there was nothing about the memory that connected it to this case, or to Auror Potter's fallen partner," Estillo intervened quietly. "Well. Have you made progress with the memory I asked _you_ to consider, Auror Malfoy?"

Draco shuddered a little. He had hoped they wouldn't dig into this, but he was asking Harry to consider some secrets in front of him. He had to do the same. "Yes," he said, voice thick. "I—I think they were wrong."

"You have told me that before," Estillo said, making another note on her parchment. "And yet, you don't sound convinced."

Draco nearly ran a hand through his hair before he remembered who he was, and where. He had picked that habit up from Harry. It wouldn't do to use it now. "They were right as they saw it," he said, staring at a portrait on the Healer's wall that showed a large woman dozing in a comfy chair, her eyes opening and closing as though she was a Muggle doll. "I can't blame them for casting me out of the Manor and out of the family when the Aurors had hurt them so much. I can't blame them for turning their backs on me."

"You can believe that," Estillo said, "accept their decision, reconcile yourself to it. Many of my pure-blood patients who have, as they see it, turned their backs on their families to accept a place in this new world think that way. What _I _am concerned for is that you do not use that realization to torment yourself, to make you think that you are a lesser person for becoming an Auror in the first place." She stood, strode around from behind the desk, and touched his hand.

Draco avoided Harry's eyes. He didn't know what expression he would be wearing, and he wanted to concentrate on the slow, difficult words that he had known would be necessary from the moment he chose to look at this memory.

"I chose what I chose in defiance of them, of their beliefs and their standards," he said. "That was part of it. How can I lie to myself about that?"

"A decision can be many things at once," Estillo said gently. "Misguided in part, noble in part. You could have chosen to spite them and yet also have come to love the work. How many years have you been an Auror, Draco?"

Harry answered, his voice soft and deep. "Four years. Not counting the three years he trained."

Estillo nodded to him in thanks, but never took her eyes from Draco. "So. This is difficult, demanding work, and few trainees make it all the way through the training program. Few are accepted in the first place, in fact. If you were determined to defy your parents and all they stood for, and _only _that, do you think you would still be an Auror?"

That was something Draco could grasp, could understand, and an argument he would not have thought of. Sometimes it seemed as though he lived in the eternal moment when he had opened the owl from his father telling him he was disinherited unless he agreed to leave the Auror program, and that there would be no further communication if he did not. He had torn up the letter and banished the owl with a shout and a curse.

It didn't soothe all the pain. It didn't change everything. But it did mean that he could think of it another way, and that there was a way to join the two images of himself in his head: good Auror, and horrible forsaken pure-blood without a family.

"No," he whispered at last. "I don't."

"It will take time to believe it completely, I know," Estillo said, and patted his shoulder before withdrawing. "Thank you for coming to see me. Harry, next time we'll talk in more detail about the memory I asked you to consider."

Harry nodded, but he wasn't looking at her. He was looking at Draco. Draco braced himself and met his eyes.

No pity. Only wonder, and respect.

Draco felt a dropping swoop in his stomach, and told himself he would think about what that meant later. He stood up and followed Harry out of the office, nodding a farewell to Estillo. He noticed the way Harry walked in front of him as if to protect him from the sight of others, and sped up so that they were walking side-by-side instead.

_This is where I want to be._


	6. Another Name for Infidelity

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Six-Another Name for Infidelity_

"It's beautiful."

Draco watched the back of Harry's head as he bent over the globe that the Unspeakable had placed on the table in front of them. Not that one could tell much from the back of a head, but then, there were also trembling hands that Harry locked together behind his back in this case. Now and then he closed his eyes as if he was struggling to hide tears.

Draco didn't expect the Unspeakable who had offered them the globe to understand that, and indeed, he didn't seem to. He just gave Harry a single curious glance and nodded. "Yes, it is. Of course, that only makes them more dangerous in this case. Someone might be drawn to pick them up having no idea what they are, and become trapped in the dreams we think they inspire."

The light inside the globe had a delicate gold-green color, like a huge tree in summer leaf and sunshine. Draco could feel the automatic twitch in the center of his own palm, the desire to hold it and see if he could make the colors change. Unlike some of the other globes in photographs, or the ones he had briefly glimpsed before Alexander used them as weapons, these hues stayed frozen and fixed. Perhaps that was a consequence of the globes continuing to exist instead of shattering, as they seemed designed to do.

"How did you know about the dreams?" Harry's voice cut through the haze that had briefly surrounded Draco's thoughts and brought him back to something that, it seemed, he should have wondered about himself.

The Unspeakable, when they looked up, smiled gently at them and shook his head. Draco watched his eyes. He was younger than most of them, and so far he had burbled happily through all the explanation they wanted instead of trying to hug his secrets to himself, the way that most of those in grey robes did. He had curly dark hair that looked the way Harry's might on an exceptionally good day and dark blue eyes.

Blue eyes that lightened as Draco watched.

"I know," said a soft, smooth, hoarse voice, not too different from the young Unspeakable's, but enough that Draco knew they were no longer speaking to the same person. "You have not been curious. If you had conducted your investigation on different lines from the beginning, then you would know as much as I know now."

"Tell us." Harry's hand was tight on his wand, and he radiated the sheer, stupid, defiant courage he always had when standing up against someone more powerful than himself-something, Draco had to admit, that he had spent his lifetime doing.

The man laughed at them, showing fine white teeth that must belong to the body he was inhabiting at the moment. "No, I rather think not. Say that I am in full sympathy with Alexander's goals in this particular instance, and see no reason to interfere in them. But I do look forward to the day that you make the same discovery, and must make the same decision I did."

The Unspeakable blinked, and the blue was gone from his eyes, or at least the unusual blue. He looked down, and saw Harry's wand, and stood very still, staying the hand he had started to lower to clutch at a device in his pocket. Harry stared at him, then grunted and lowered his wand, shaking his head.

"Sorry," he said. "We've spent too much investigating these bloody globes. For a moment, you acted like you were affected by them."

A neat lie, Draco had to admit-neater than he would have thought Harry capable of. He reached out and touched his elbow, and Harry nodded back, confirming his support and asking for Draco's in return. Draco stood still, his hands clasped behind his back in turn, a picture of earnest innocence.

"Well, it's true I don't have much of a memory of the last few minutes," the Unspeakable muttered, and swiped at his forehead, frowning. "I don't...oh, well. They'll take me off this case soon, anyway, and assign me to a place that can better use my talents."

"You don't know anything about dreams connected to the globes?" Harry asked. Draco debated reminding him that there was really no reason to say such a thing, and then decided to keep silent. Harry's moment for taking the lead, Harry's moment for deciding how he wanted to handle it.

"Dreams? No." The Unspeakable shook his head. "Not my area of expertise, and not something we'd think to look for. The globes do _nothing _when we touch them." Then he leaned towards Harry and lowered his voice. "But if you do know something about how they work, of course we would welcome the information."

Draco stifled a snort. _Unspeakables._ They would disclaim an interest with one breath and demand any new thoughts someone else might have with another. Their world was made of thoughts and research, and putting them in the right order. Little they cared if those thoughts and research ever found a position to actually _attach _to.

Harry shrugged. "We have a few thoughts, but no sure conclusions. And we have a very limited sample."

The Unspeakable let them go at those deadly words, muttered a few complaints about his work assignment, found them unsympathetic, and scooped up the globe with a cloth to carry it into the back room. Harry watched him go with his fingers playing on his wand, and then shook his head.

"I want to know who he is," he murmured.

Draco knew he didn't mean the man they'd spoken to for most of their time down here. He touched Harry's elbow again, and Harry nodded and started threading his way out of the Department of Mysteries, lowering his voice but continuing to complain. "He's shown up enough times by now. There ought to be a way to track him. And what does he know about Alexander that we don't?"

"We'll learn," Draco said. "You know we haven't had much ability to investigate Alexander close to, let alone him." He had no name that would suit for the blue-eyed menace they encountered on a regular basis, so calling him by a pronoun felt right.

"I know," Harry said. "But we can consider. And...one thing I didn't consider. He might have spoken to Leah."

Draco smiled and curled his fingers around Harry's arm. "Exactly where I was going to suggest we go next."

* * *

This time, the door of Eleanor's Enchantments was slightly ajar, but when Draco knocked on the door, a mouth appeared in the wood, opened in a wide yawn, and snapped, "We're closed. Next opening on the evening of never." It slammed shut again, making splinters fly out.

Draco ducked without taking his eyes off the door. Harry was impressed despite himself, and then rolled his eyes. _Right. You're impressed with the little things he does the same way that you were impressed when Lionel did them. You heard Draco. You had a little crush, and you blew it up into something big. The same thing is happening now. It'll pass._

That was the only comforting thing about his crush on Draco, Harry decided. If Draco was right and he'd just been infatuated with Lionel, not in love with him, then the excessive grief should die away soon. Probably the infatuation would have died if Lionel had lived. And his weird fascination with Draco would do the same thing. It might take a little longer because he was constantly side-by-side with Draco, but it would.

Draco cast a small spell that moved the door back and forth as if it weighed much less than it actually did. Then a network of pale blue lines over the door flared to life. Draco snorted quietly. "Wards. But she didn't close the door fully, and they didn't engage." He leaned close to Harry and lowered his voice to a whisper that made the bottom of Harry's stomach shiver. "You go around the back. So that we don't seem as if we're entering illegally, I'll call out, but I doubt she'll come this way."

Harry had heard the faint, hurried sounds inside the shop, too, the ones that made it likely Leah was packing up and would run away when she realized who was there. He nodded and circled into the alley behind the shop, ducking so he would be less visible from the windows. He could smell a strong, sharp odor that made him wonder if she'd spilled some ingredients in her haste.

Then he cocked his head. No. He'd smelled that particular scent before, and it didn't come from Potions ingredients, which Harry never spent time around unless he had to. It came from a particular kind of oil that, like Muggle kerosene, could make a fire burn faster, and hotter, and longer.

He started to circle back to warn Draco, but at that moment, Draco, probably assuming Harry had had enough time to get in position, rapped his knuckles on the door and called, "Aurors! Come out, please, Miss Anderson! We have to talk to you about the attack by Alexander."

Harry hesitated once, then decided that he could trust Draco to take care of himself for the length of time this would take and ran as fast as he could towards the back door of the shop. He heard a sound that might have been Leah casting a spell or taking a frightened breath, and then she responded in a calm, rational voice that trembled only a little. "Auror Malfoy? Thank goodness you're here. There's been no second attack here, but I heard about the one on you. I _am_ glad that you're all right."

_And how did you hear about that, hmmm? _Harry thought, settling down behind the back door and checking to make sure there weren't any other points of exit from the shop. Granted, Alexander's ambush of them _had _happened in a public street, but the news still seemed to have spread suspiciously fast. Especially since all of Leah's neighbors had claimed not to know where she was a short time ago.

"I'm fine, yes, and so's my partner," Draco said in a calmer voice. "But we do have to ask you a few questions about Alexander's past work history. Can you come out of the shop, Miss Anderson? Or may I come in? This isn't the kind of discussion that we should have in a public place."

More soft, frightened breaths. Harry, every sense alert and tingling the way it used to be when he hunted with Lionel, _felt _the moment when Leah came up with a plan. "Of course, Auror Malfoy," she said. "Please give me some time to move the crates, though. I'm afraid a new shipment of ingredients came in today and I haven't been as quick to organize them as I should have been."

Harry rose slowly to his feet to look in through one of the darkened windows. He made out a woman's figure stooping over what looked like a crate and coming up with a flask. It could have been Firewhisky to steady her nerves, or, given that it was an apothecary, any of a number of liquid ingredients that Harry was unfamiliar with, but what it smelled like was the oil that would accelerate fire.

Harry waited one more moment. Leah could still intend to answer Draco's summons, or Draco might want to wait because, if she cooperated, bursting into her shop would look bad.

But then Leah turned and doused the entire contents of one container open at her feet in the oil, and raised her wand. "_Incen_-" she began.

Harry slammed his shoulder into the door, which had no wards on it, probably because it was used by the people who delivered to Leah. It shook, and Leah lost the incantation and backed away, looking pale and cowering in the moonlight. At the same moment, Draco came in through the front door, ducking and rolling as one stray ward that must have engaged burst above him, and coming to his feet with his wand against Leah's neck. The first thing he did was cast a _Lumos _Charm, and it filled the shop with enough light to show Leah's terror and the smooth way Draco held her, one arm snug around her waist.

Harry blinked. He didn't know that Lionel, or he himself, could have managed a capture better.

_And you need to stop thinking this way. _

With his face burning, Harry stepped up to Draco and nodded once at Leah. "How do you want to handle this?" he asked quietly. He hoped Draco wouldn't ask him about his flush, because he wouldn't be able to tell the truth, and they needed trust at the moment to present a united front.

Other than one quick glance at him, though, Draco didn't seem inclined to take his eyes off Leah. "I want to make sure that she can't escape, first of all," he responded, and whispered words under his breath that made silvery ropes appear and snake around her arms and legs, doubling her up. "And then I want to encourage her to talk to us." His wand tapped against her throat.

"You'll never understand what happened here without me," Leah whispered. "And you'll never encourage me to talk. I know what spells you're allowed to use. None of them would convince me."

Draco smiled, and there were edges to that smile that made Harry back up. When Draco stepped around in front of Leah and showed it to her, she flinched and tried to lift her arms to shield her face, forgetting they were bound. Draco floated her backwards and into one of the chairs that still stood in the shop, leaning against some high shelves Leah had probably taken ingredients from.

"You forget which Corps we belong to," Draco said quietly. "The mission of Socrates Corps is to kill the twisted. And if someone else gets in the way, someone who has secrets about the twisted and won't give them up, I don't think our masters will look too closely at what we had to do to get that information."

Leah flushed, and her trembling hands started to rise. Then she snatched them back to her sides a moment before the ropes could tug tight around her wrists. "That's not true," she whispered. "I know it's not. You're only trying to frighten me."

Certain she wasn't looking at him, Harry rolled his eyes. Really, what other motive would they _have_?

Draco bent closer and breathed out into Leah's face. Leah jerked her head back, her fists doubling up again, but Draco just kept talking, his voice so deep and calm that one had to listen closely to figure out why Leah was flushing and paling at once.

"Really? You would be willing to bet your life and sanity on that? There are Dark spells I can use that leave no mark even in the mind, and the only witness is my partner, who stands as loyal to me in everything I do." He flashed a smile back at Harry, who blinked before he nodded jerkily. He didn't know if that made it convincing enough to Leah, but then, Leah had never taken her eyes off Draco. "And there is nothing on your shop that will detect Dark Arts like that, or I would already have felt it."

"I could-I could testify..." Leah's voice trailed off into a bubbling squeak as she stared at Draco, who stared critically back.

"You _believe _that," he said. "You believe that I would leave you enough of a mind to testify with after scooping out what I need." He shook his head and sighed sadly. "You work with Dark wizards and yet don't understand them well enough to be allowed to face one by yourself. It's sad, the deficiencies of our education system these days."

Leah swallowed and then opened her eyes, so bright that Harry thought she would weep. "I can appeal for protection," she said, and turned her gaze on Harry. "You would not let this happen to someone, would you, Auror Potter?" she asked. "We all know what they say about you. That you're a hero, that you wouldn't let someone torture even an enemy. And what he's talking about would be torture."

Harry raised his eyebrows. His mouth said, "Alexander flung a globe at me, and it hit me, and I was unconscious for several hours. I still don't know exactly how else it might have affected me. That was your fault, I think. If you'd told us the truth from the beginning, then we would have known to be more wary of the globes, and of Alexander."

But his mind was thinking about the memory of Draco at his desk that Healer Estillo had pulled forwards during their session, and how Draco had smiled at him and used his first name in sleepy unconsciousness of what had been happening around him. He was comparing that smile with the utterly mirthless one Draco wore now, and trying to see them as two different people. Lionel had never been cruel. That might make a difference between them in Harry's mind, and mean that his feelings for Draco would shift and change.

He couldn't see them as different facets of Draco, though. He saw them as parts of the same man, and they remained stubbornly joined in his mind even as Leah slumped back in her chair and moaned, and Draco moved towards her to whisper in her ear like a lover. "We don't have to hurt you. There's no reason to think that. As long as you tell us the truth, and tell us _all _about Alexander without holding anything back, there's no reason to hurt you. Will you do that?"

Leah swallowed, then bobbed her head frantically enough to nearly knock herself out on the back of the chair. Draco nodded back to her once. "Good. Why do you have powdered blood in vials and boxes all over the shop? What kind of blood is it?"

Leah hesitated, and her hands twisted together. Harry glanced about and made sure that her wand was still lying on the floor and she didn't have it in her pocket. They should have Disarmed her, perhaps, but her letting her wand fly away when Draco had grabbed her was as good as an _Expelliarmus. _Harry moved a step forwards and pinned the wand down with his foot.

"Wizards' blood," Leah said at last. "_Special _wizards' blood. But given willingly," she added defiantly, perhaps because she had seen something in Draco's face that Harry hadn't. "You can't arrest me for breaking the laws about blood magic, because I always asked first, and paid a fair price."

"Special wizards' blood, you said." Draco leaned nearer to her, and Harry watched as she flinched and craned her head back. He said nothing about how much he longed to be in her place, because it wasn't something either Draco or Leah would be interested in hearing right now. "Tell me how."

"The blood of-of Dark wizards," Leah faltered, and although Harry had never been expert in reading small signs in witnesses the way some other Aurors were, he knew she was lying. "I-don't make me say any more."

"But I want to," Draco said, and Harry saw him spin his wand so that it pointed straight at the center of Leah's forehead, which it hadn't before.

"The blood of the twisted," Leah whispered. "Who are really just Dark wizards who aren't good at Healing magic and have an ability of wandless magic. That's all they are. That's _all_." She stared at Draco, and seemed to expect him to respond to that somehow, although Harry didn't know why. Seeing the way Draco's lips drew back from his teeth, she ought to have known he would use that information to build a stronger and better case, not leave something alone.

"And they could agree to anything, could they?" Draco whispered. "When they're mad, and that's also part of the definition?"

Leah laughed, and her hands clenched in her bonds. "You don't _understand_. You and the Socrates Corps and the Ministry, carefully defining the twisted as separate from their precious, precious employees!" She jerked her head at Harry. "Don't you _understand? _I've heard about you, about how you have trouble with Healing magic, about how you have the wandless ability to see the visions of people's deaths. What does that make you but a twisted? Different definitions, but of course the Ministry would define them so as to leave you out, and of course it would think that the best people to hunt twisted are twisted themselves!"

Draco's face went white, and for a moment his hands on his wand trembled. Then they steadied, but his face remained colorless, and Harry understood why. Harry's ability to do wandless magic was public because it had helped him more than once in his cases and the papers had reported on it, but Draco also had a hidden gift like it. He was sensitive to Dark magic and could tell in an instant if an innocent object had been tainted with it, or a person. And he had once told Harry that he also had trouble with Healing magic, at least beyond simple spells like _Episkey_.

_Shit._

Harry's mind darted through some of the other Aurors in their Corps. Auror Warren had once mentioned that she could "smell" trouble from the past; if she was in a place where someone had died violently or committed suicide, her nose would twitch and flood with the scent of blood. It made it impossible for her to be in some parts of St. Mungo's and the Ministry. Auror Macgeorge, one of their newest recruits, carried a finger bone in one of her pockets, and more than once Harry had seen it twitch and point and vibrate. He had thought it was a little Charm or sleight-of-hand on Macgeorge's part, but maybe not. And necromancy had always been called the Darkest of Dark magic.

_Shit_.

Leah abruptly lunged to her feet and tried to make her way past them. Draco cast another binding hex that tripped her up, and made no attempt to catch her as she fell to the floor. She gasped and sobbed, probably because she'd broken her nose. Draco levered her back into her chair, and continued in a voice so merciless that Harry would have thought all his changed and broken perceptions hidden away if he didn't know the man as well as he did.

"I want to know what happened with Alexander. Did you know that he was a twisted when you hired him?"

Leah shivered and whimpered and said nothing until Draco cast a rough _Episkey _to heal her nose. Then she whispered, "You're stupid. I would take their blood, but I wouldn't work with one. They can't control themselves. He _became _a twisted. He drank potions made with the powdered blood, even though I told him that wasn't safe, that the blood had to be diluted, and anyway it was better to use it on your skin, not ingest it-"

"You idiot," Draco said, his voice deadened, and his face paling again. He caught Harry's eye.

Harry nodded back. If there was a way of spreading a twisted's nature and magic like an infection, then they were in _trouble_, and the Ministry would probably go to any lengths to suppress the information. Which could be dangerous for future cases.

"This is what we're going to do," Draco said, his voice soft and brisk. "We're taking you into protective custody for the moment, because we don't know when Alexander may come back here-"

Something with too many limbs and too many heads oozed through the front window and attacked Draco, its limbs swinging out to embrace him and one tentacle plunging down his throat. Alexander followed it, striding through the door as if it wasn't there; the splinters disappeared down the throat of a second, shadowy creature that accompanied him. With a flick of his wrist, he sent it forwards at Harry.

Harry leaped over it and charged the beast holding Draco without thought. He had Shield Charms up against the globe that Alexander launched a moment later, and the shadows that scraped at his ankles. But he couldn't care about them, or what Alexander might do to Leah.

He had lost one partner. It would not happen a second time.


	7. Varieties of Loyalty

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Seven-Varieties of Loyalty_

Draco choked on the tentacle, and kicked out with his feet, trying frantically to put distance between himself and the beast. It didn't seem to matter; the beast still followed him, and the tentacles still whirled in circles and came down, crossed in front of the creature, in a pattern that would make it extremely difficult to get a spell between them. Draco could see boils erupting from the creature's skin that would probably form defensive shields, as well.

And meanwhile, he was _choking on a tentacle._

He could see Alexander's face, the man following his nightmares, his hand resting on a globe. He had no expression; his eyes were calm and merciless, the way Draco sometimes saw his in a mirror on a good day. He watched Draco and no one else, as though gauging how long he could hold his breath.

That explained why he didn't see Harry coming until it was too late.

Suddenly magic was there, surrounding Draco, lapping against his legs, so thick and persistent that he felt it as a countercurrent to the terrible pull in his throat. And it rose, and grabbed the beast in front of him, and hurled it against the far wall. Then an invisible foot crushed it the way a giant might crush an ant. Draco watched the grey blood and skin fly apart with fascination.

Alexander turned to face Harry. He tossed another globe at him, but Harry dodged, rolled, and slammed into Alexander's legs.

They fell. The twisted never changed expression, and Draco knew why. He had a variety of weapons at his command, and he didn't seem to care about his own life. If Leah was right and he had become a twisted because of an infection of blood and not because he had studied the Dark Arts until he went mad, then he might even be "altruistic" enough to die in pursuit of his goal.

_Whatever the bloody thing is, _Draco thought, and cast a binding spell as Alexander's leg flew past. The spell manifested as a long whip of leather coiled around Draco's wrist and leading to Alexander's leg, and when Draco took a step sideways and snapped his arm in the same direction, Alexander flew out of the writhing pile and landed on his back with a solid _thump_, as if he was made of mahogany.

Draco moved closer to him. Alexander looked up at him and tossed a globe into his face.

Draco, remembering the way the last one had gone through his shields, whirled to the side with his arm tucked securely around his face. The globe soared above his shoulder and smashed against the far wall with a tinkling noise. Draco had the mad vision, for a moment, of the wall growing a shield that would protect it against the influence of twisted for the rest of its existence. Because surely that was what Alexander was trying to do, or a version of it. If Leah was right and the Aurors in the Socrates Corps resembled twisted, then Alexander didn't seem to want to form any sort of common cause with them.

Something cold grabbed Draco's ankle and numbed his feet at once, causing him to wobble. When he looked down, all he saw was a mass of shadows, flowing and flowering around him and rising continually higher. For a moment, his vision swam with remembrance. The Dementors, and the way they had looked like this, fountains of shadow, of cold...

"_Expecto Patronum!_"

A silver stag, the most glorious sight Draco had ever seen in his life, swept past him and dipped its head, catching the shadowy creature on its antlers. When it reared, the shadow creature squalled, and when the stag shook its antlers, the creature tore apart. Draco blinked once, twice. Well, if the thing had had some resemblance to Dementors, it made sense that it might be able to be fought the same way. It was faster thinking than he was used to expecting of Harry, that was all.

He turned back in time to see Alexander throw another globe at him. Harry stepped in between them and raised a Shield Charm.

Back in the street attack, Harry's shields had been enough to keep the globe away. This time, the globe soared straight through them and struck Harry in the chest. Harry blinked and staggered back a step.

Then the globe exploded, and Draco's eyes were full of flying blood and flesh. He thought he saw Alexander disappear out the shop's broken door, he knew he heard Leah's frightened gasping, but everything else disappeared until he was at Harry's side and resting his hand over his heart.

It still beat. Draco closed his eyes. Not even the revelation that the Dark Lord was dead and he _had _a rest of his life to look forward to had ever been so important.

Then he forced himself to look at the bloody wound in the center of Harry's chest. It was shallower than he had thought, but a literal groove digging downwards, and Draco at once cast the spells that would prevent it from bleeding further out and hopefully protect Harry's organs through the jouncing that would follow. Then he turned around to offer reassurances, if Harry wanted them.

Harry's eyes were closed, his face pale and covered with a sheen of sweat. Just as had happened after the first globe, he was unconscious again.

Draco took one of his hands and squeezed hard enough to make the bones in Harry's fingers creak. _I don't know where you are, what world you're walking with Vane. Come back to me._

* * *

"You've had enough adventures for five lifetimes."

Harry blinked and opened his eyes. He had expected to find himself on the grass under the trees again, but this time, he was in the middle of a cool room in the cottage he had seen before, with the windows open and sunlight and the breeze and birdsong swooping in. He sat up on the bed, and discovered that the sheets were like gathered clouds around him, the way he had always dreamed they might be when he read fairy tales as a child.

And Lionel sat opposite him, sipping a cup of tea and smiling.

"Is Draco all right?" Harry croaked out, and Lionel paused in reaching for another cup of tea, presumably to hand to him.

"I don't know," he said quietly. "I only know what happened to me since I...left, and what passes through your memories. And neither includes any information about that." He gave Harry the tea, and Harry closed his hand around it, feeling the smoothness of the cup and the warmth against his fingers. "Does it really matter so much?"

"Of course," Harry said, and sipped, and let the tastes burst apart in his mouth and reassemble as what felt like a starburst of sparks. "He's my partner."

"That used to be my title." Lionel didn't move and didn't raise his eyes from his teacup, but he didn't have to, not when his lowered voice spoke for him.

Harry winced, and wondered how he could say what he needed to without being condescending. He hadn't moved on, not really. That would be as stupid to say as it was false. He still thought of Lionel. He still looked at him and wondered why it couldn't have worked out between them, why he had been fucked over before he ever opened his mouth to confess his love.

But it no longer seemed as urgent as it would have a few hours or days ago. Why?

_Because you think that you're falling in love with Draco bloody Malfoy, that's why._

Cold shame took away all the pleasure of the tea. Harry set it down carefully on the table beside him and sat up. "I don't think that I can be what you want me to be," he said. "Not anymore, not when I'm alive and you're dead." The words appeared to hit Lionel like arrows, from the way he hunched his shoulders, but Harry went on speaking, ignoring the way his heartbeat buzzed and leaped in his ears. He would have to, for the moment. "And Draco can't be what I want him to be, either. I'm starting to think that I haven't really ever been in love with anyone, not when my feelings are shallow and I can transfer them from person to person."

Lionel stared at him with those wonderful dark eyes shining as if he might weep. "That's not true," he said. "You were loyal to me. I know you were. What I was then wouldn't allow me to accept how loyal you really were, how much courage it took for you to tell me the truth, but I see it now."

"_What _you were," Harry echoed quietly. "Not _who _you were. Lionel...this is wonderful, this life that you seem to promise me." He gestured around the house decorated just the way he always would have liked it to be, and then at Lionel, who was focused on him as though he was the only person in the universe. Harry could remember the time he would have happily killed to see that. "But it's not real."

"It's real if you want it to be," Lionel said. "If you find the gate. The key." His hands trembled, and he stared down at them until they stopped.

"I accept that," Harry said. "But the only gate I want to find is the one to the world where I stop becoming infatuated with my partners. It's not fair to them. To you, or to Draco. We need to be partners first, and not-I don't know. I don't think that I was even thinking in terms of lovers, or boyfriends. Just _something_, grand and passionate and silly. I feel too much. I want too much, for what you can give me."

_I really should have thought of that before. _It was what everyone had been trying to tell him, Draco and Lionel and even Ginny, who had finally told Harry that she had to break up with him because his concentration on her alone was just too stifling.

Harry wondered for a moment if he could ask for a few weeks of holiday time when they were finished with the Alexander case. Go somewhere by himself, or travel, or take up some of the magical hobbies that Ron and Hermione had told him he would enjoy. Do _something _that would make him be alone and not forever pining after someone to complete him.

_But you have to survive the Alexander case first. And that means coming back from this world where the globes put you._

He climbed slowly up from the bed and looked around the room. Lionel's chair was between him and the door, but Harry didn't worry much about that. If this illusion was still acting like the real Lionel, then he wouldn't try to prevent Harry from leaving. If he did oppose Harry, that would make it all the easier to shake free of him.

"Harry." Lionel stood and reached out an appealing hand. "I wanted to be here in the first place because I thought it would mean I had a second chance with you. Are you telling me that's not true, that it's never going to happen?"

"It's never going to happen," Harry said, and he breathed through the sadness that seemed to be clogging his throat, "because you are _dead_, Lionel. That's the entire point of this. That's the point of Alexander flinging the globe at me in the first place, I think, to make me think that I have no reason to remain alive, and I should just stay here with you in the dream-world and not come back."

"This part isn't real," Lionel said, dropping his hand and looking at Harry with eyes that now were too dry. "It could be, if you searched. If you looked hard enough for the light past the darkness in you."

Harry paused. Those could be random words, spoken as the magic in Alexander's globe felt it was losing control, but he didn't think so. Not when everything else in this dream-world had been so carefully tailored to him.

"What do you mean?" he asked quietly. "The light past the darkness? What do you mean?"

"The darkness that's the flaw," Lionel said, and his eyes had changed. They still had the same shine that Harry remembered from the times he'd been alive, but his hands were clasped in front of him as though he was going to swing them like a club and hit Harry on the side of the head. "I know what your gift of visions is. Didn't you always wonder why you had them, when you were never a Seer and sucked at Divination all your life?"

"I thought it was because of the Dark magic I took during the war, or because of Voldemort," Harry said. "I had visions of him, too." He wondered for a moment if he should be saying that, if Alexander could get the knowledge and use it somehow, but it was clear Alexander, if he knew the content of these visions, didn't know _everything. _Otherwise, he could have convinced Harry already. "What's important is the way I use them, not that they exist."

"But a flaw makes you a twisted," Lionel said, leaning towards him. "And twisted need to be hunted and put down for the good of society. Or is it different when they're _Aurors?"_ And his mouth curled.

_That's it, _Harry told himself, memorizing the expression for the instant it lasted. _That's Alexander speaking, not Lionel. Lionel would never despise Aurors like that. Our Corps, yeah, maybe, but not the job itself._

"Maybe we do," Harry said quietly. "But if Alexander thinks that, if that's what he's trying to accomplish with his globes, then why hasn't he already committed suicide? Or at least handed himself to the people he could trust to kill him? That's a question I would want to ask. You know, if I could have a chance to talk to him."

For the first time, Lionel's gaze flickered, and he turned his head in the opposite direction. "How would I know what Alexander thinks?" he asked. "We're two separate people."

"I don't think so, no," Harry said. He edged closer, and wondered if anything would happen if he tried to grab Lionel. Or he could just dash around him and try to get out the door now. In the end, he settled for talking. "You know what I do, you said. That would explain how you know what Leah told us about our wandless abilities being flaws, and the flaws marking the twisted. But I don't necessarily _believe _that. It sounds like you do."

"It makes sense," Lionel said, running a hand through his hair. "But I can't argue with it if you'd rather kill people, of course."

"I'd rather _protect _people," Harry corrected him. "If that means thinking about the definition of twisted and changing it some of the time, then that's what I'll do. But I have to stop Alexander first. He's not a twisted who's interested in doing anything but killing people right now, I think."

"You don't want to stay here with me?" And still Lionel's eyes had something of the man Harry had known in them, even if they were larger and darker than normal.

"No," Harry said. "I thought-I thought that was what I wanted. But I really am shallow and fickle, the same way Draco thought I was. I loved the man I wanted you to be, not the man you were. And I don't want you to change yourself after death just to fit me. If you're real. If you're not some projection from Alexander's globe that's fucking with my head, anyway."

Lionel caught his breath and closed his eyes. "You'll never know what you're missing," he said.

"I think I do," Harry said. "Here? In this little world that's designed to be perfect for me? I do. Every day would be the same. But no, I don't know what my life would have been like if my love for you had been real and you loved me back." He swallowed, and wondered who he had to thank for this new courage, to say things like that and think it wouldn't be the end of the world. Draco? Healer Estillo? Even Alexander?

"You can find out, if you stay here," Lionel said, and opened his eyes. "I think you're more capable of love than you think you are."

Harry shrugged, and then in one smooth motion sped past Lionel and out the door of the bedroom, through the main room of the cottage, and out the door that led to the lake.

The world beyond, on the shore of the lake, resembled a washed-out picture, and Harry grimaced at the lack of color in it. But he kept going, his head bowed as though fighting a strong wind. One was beginning to pick up, in fact, whipping the flat surface of the lake into small waves.

Lionel didn't chase after him, didn't call after him. Harry looked back over his shoulder once and saw him standing in the doorway of the cottage, his arms folded as though he was cold, his head bowed and his shoulders braced.

Harry half-wanted to go back, to say that he was sorry, to tell Lionel that it would be all right and he would _make _things all right if they weren't. But he had come this far, and he thought the pathetic posture was probably one more trick of Alexander's globes. He kept on plodding along.

And then the world faded around him. Grey became more grey, the surface of the lake opened like a popping balloon, and Harry found himself practically diving into the void that opened at his feet. Harry held his breath, and then let it out. He was certain nothing would happen to him.

Alexander could enchant his mind, make him believe what wasn't true, try to kill him. But there was no reason to try to persuade Harry to stay in this unreal world if he could kill him easily in his mind.

* * *

Draco clenched his teeth as the breath began to pass more rapidly in and out of Harry's lungs, and his eyes fluttered open. He had taken Harry back to their office after one of the Auror Healers took care of the wound in his chest, because he was half-convinced that this unconscious state would pass as the other had, and the Healers hadn't helped much with that last time. And there was still the ban in place keeping Harry from St. Mungo's.

There was, also, squirming and unacknowledged, the desire to be the one who had tended Harry, the one responsible for Harry's waking if he did wake.

But he had second-guessed his decision for the last hour, and had ended by promising himself that he would go to the Auror Healers if Harry didn't wake by the time that the clock recorded ninety minutes since the attack. Here Harry was, eighty-seven minutes afterwards, sitting up and looking around the room with a faint smile. Draco took a step back and clasped his hands behind him, uncertain how Harry would react to him.

"You brought me back here?" Harry nodded to him in a manner that made it clear it wasn't really a question. "Thank you."

"You would rather not deal with the screaming fans and friends and photographers, I would assume," Draco said. It was to their advantage that their visit to Leah had happened in the evening, and that most of the reporters assumed that interest was gone from that street of shops after Alexander's latest attack. "Miss Anderson is now in the custody of the Unspeakables, by the way."

"I wish them joy of her," Harry said, and rubbed the back of his neck. "I saw Lionel again."

Draco held himself still and did nothing but raise an eyebrow, because anything he said would reveal too much. Or perhaps too little.

"He told me that I could come to that world and be with him, but..." Harry frowned at the far wall. "I think I'm finally free of that infatuation you accused me of having with him." Then he winced and held up a hand, before Draco could open a mouth and get the words out. "Sorry. I phrased that badly. You were right about my love for him being an-obsession, not real. The thought of staying there with him for the rest of my life doesn't appeal. So I came back."

Draco stared at Harry. Harry kept looking aside, his hand rubbing at the nape of his neck all the while, as though he had ripped through a collar someone tried to put there. Draco was pleased if it was Lionel, but he could not keep the words that he spoke next from leaving his lips.

"So you decided on your own that your love for him was false, and you needed to come back?" He shook his head. "The man you were mourning not even a month ago, the man whose death made you change your mind about loving someone or having sex again? Forgive me for being skeptical that this is a real change."

Harry stiffened and curled his fingers into the desk hard enough to crumple a piece of parchment on it. Draco wondered if he'd noticed yet that Draco had softened the desk with a Cushioning Charm. Probably not. It was the sort of thing that Harry didn't notice because he considered comfort unimportant.

"As you said, that was a bit of a silly idea, that I could never fall in love again," Harry said. "Or-have sex again." A bright blush overtook his face, but at least he met Draco's eyes. "So. I've decided to take a leave of absence from the Ministry when this case is done, and see if I can determine why I have the tendency to fall in love with someone suddenly and have it turn out to be infatuation. Get some distance. That's the best idea."

Draco bit his lips, and said nothing about who they would assign him to as a partner or whether they would allow Harry a holiday from Socrates Corps, because it would come out wrong. "It seems that Alexander's visions lose their power when he uses a second globe, then," he said instead. "I wonder why he bothered tossing a second one at you?"

Harry shrugged. "Lionel-the imagined one-said something about the darkness in me and how evil it makes me. Maybe Alexander believes the same thing Leah does, about us being twisted, and that we should be locked up ourselves."

"If he does, why target others?" Draco shook his head. "I could believe that he believes that about the Aurors in Socrates Corps, yes, and it makes us understandable targets. But Stuart? Syles? Why?"

"I don't know," Harry said. He paused, as though about to say something else, and then slid off the desk. "Unless we posit that he has some means of detecting other twisted. Perhaps the forms that his companions take around us? They do seem to take different forms in each attack."

Draco opened his mouth to answer, but the door of the office flew open then, and they both jumped as Auror Macgeorge strode in. Her partner, Auror Rudie, came behind her, once a wide-eyed youngster whom the last few months had hardened. She nodded to both of them, but left it to Macgeorge to explain their abrupt entrance.

"Seems you're wanted in the Department of Mysteries," Macgeorge said, talking to Draco alone, as she often did. They were both pure-bloods, and they both understood, as pure-bloods who did not try to live in the world did not, what that meant in the wake of the war. "Seems a globe exploded, and now one of their Unspeakables is in a coma." She raised an eyebrow. "And he's lost his magic, too."


	8. Intrcacies of Magic

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Eight-Intricacies of Magic_

"_Finite Incantatem._"

The spell blew away the last remnants of the diagnostic one that Harry had cast on the comatose Unspeakable. Harry raised his head and glared in response, pushing his glasses up his nose when they would have fallen. The movement made him pale, and Draco reckoned he'd pulled the wound in his chest tighter than was wise. "Did you _have _to do that?" Harry hissed. "We were just getting some information here."

Draco sighed. "No, we weren't." He and Harry had spent the last two hours combing over Unspeakable Retror's body, and it had still yielded no information. He might as well have been a Muggle corpse for anything he told them. Draco had used all the revival spells he knew, and Harry the diagnostic ones, which was a surprisingly large array for someone with such a tendency to anger Healers. Or perhaps _not _surprisingly large, now that Draco thought about it. Harry must have needed, more than once, to assess how serious a wound was and whether he needed to go to hospital.

Draco took a deep breath to clear his lungs of the unwanted anger and said, "Harry. What information do you think we're going to find if we remain here?"

Harry paused, and then the self-importance blew out of him like the spell and left him sagging. He sighed and sat down in the middle of the room where they were keeping Retror's body, stretching his arms over his head. "Nothing, really. What do you think we should do about it?"

Draco took a glance around the bare stone room for a moment instead of answering. The Unspeakables had removed any artifacts that Harry and Draco could have learned anything from, because secrecy was more important to the Department of Mysteries than the health of their employees. Of course, someone had already moved Retror from the room he'd fallen in, so any chance of examining an undisturbed site was destroyed anyway.

"I think we should ask those who knew him certain questions," Draco said, watching the walls. Had he detected a flicker of movement in them? He thought he had. If the Unspeakables spied on their words, Draco was at least determined not to make it easy for them. "Such as how long he'd spent around the globes, how often he had touched this one that exploded, whether anyone else had a bad reaction to them, and so on."

"That's not what you were going to say." Harry narrowed his eyes at him.

Draco caught his gaze and then glanced at the walls. Harry understood without the need for further explanation, which Draco found impressive. He stood with a brisk snap of his head and walked in the direction of the distant door, his footsteps echoing. Draco tilted his head to the side and thought he could hear the echoes bouncing in places they shouldn't, as though parts of the walls were hollow or close to it.

"We shouldn't waste time here if we're not going to discover anything," Harry called over his shoulder. "We'll make up a list of witnesses to ask questions of in our office and see how many the Department of Mysteries wants us actually interviewing, how about that?"

Draco gave whoever was watching a smile to consider and then followed Harry. "That sounds fine to me," he said.

They preserved a dignified silence throughout the Department, and Draco was sure that more eyes followed them than necessary because of that. He looked at the ceiling, the walls, the hooded grey robes that rustled past them, anything but Harry and the eyes of those that watched them. Let them assume his nose was always in the air. It would probably be better for both him and Harry in the end.

They reached the door they'd used to enter the Department, and Unspeakable Mellon, the current liaison to other Departments in the Ministry, came in to meet them, her steps surprisingly heavy on the floor for such a small woman. Draco had heard rumors that one of the artifacts she'd examined had turned her feet to stone. That might explain some things. "Were you able to figure out what caused Eliot's loss of magic?" she asked.

"Still investigating, Unspeakable Mellon," Harry said, and smiled at her, the kind of smile Draco had never seen directed at him. He suspected Harry reserved them for newspaper interviews, which there hadn't been many of since they joined the Socrates Corps. "I promise we'll let you know the instant we find something, though."

"Of course." Mellon turned her head and stared down the corridor, face so distant that Draco would have believed she was mourning for Retror if not for those eyes in the walls. Mellon was too high up in the Unspeakable hierarchy not to know about them. "Well. I do hope this investigation is concluded quickly."

_So we can quit inviting people from other Departments who ask questions in and go back to playing around with time and space and endangering everyone in Britain, _Draco completed the sentence silently.

Mellon turned and looked at him as if she'd heard that correction. Draco smiled blandly at her-he was good at that, after having to attend Ministry functions that included friends of his parents-and guided Harry out. He realized that he was touching the middle of Harry's back quite often, his hand hovering above it as though there was a weapon there he needed to draw.

He thought seriously about it, and decided to keep it there. He enjoyed it, and though Harry might not be aware, he walked more briskly and appeared more alert when Draco had his hand on him. And the Unspeakables would already have seen the gesture and be able to use the knowledge against them, if they wanted to. Trying to disguise it now would only make them know Draco knew he was being observed. So he walked sedately along, and waited for the moment Harry would notice.

He didn't yet do it, though. He waited until they were outside the Ministry, because that was where Draco took him, and walking through Diagon Alley. Then he said, "You don't trust the Unspeakables?"

"I don't think they'll tell us the truth about anything that concerns the globes," Draco said. "Not when things like that are so much more precious to them than human lives, and they'll downplay the danger to be allowed to go on studying them." He opened the door of a small sandwich shop and nodded into it. Harry stared at him, and Draco remembered they had never been out to eat together, unless one counted meals at their desks as being "out." He smiled at Harry, and let his teeth show. "Come on. I'm hungry, and I don't trust any place in the Ministry to be beyond the Unspeakables' reach, if they want to reach it."

Harry sighed, paused, then walked in front of him. Draco admired the way his robes flowed behind him, at least until he had to make it clear that he wanted a chicken and cheese sandwich instead of one of the other four varieties the shop served. Then he leaned against the wall to wait, and Harry stood beside him and murmured into his ear.

"What did you want to ask?"

Draco closed his eyes, luxuriating for a moment in having his partner near and relatively compliant with him. "Whether Retror had any wandless abilities of note," he murmured. "And any difficulty with Healing magic."

Harry caught his breath. Then he said, "_How _can Alexander tell? That's the question I want the answer to the most. Sure, he might know-or think he knows-what we are in the Socrates Corps, but he can't assume that the Unspeakable who examines the globes would be, or Stuart, or Syles."

"I think we've been asking questions like this from the wrong end," Draco said, and went to fetch his sandwich as the shopgirl waved it at him. He waited until he was sure Harry had his own corned beef sandwich in hand, and then led the way to one of the scarred, battered tables. "We should think about what exactly we know about Alexander, and what we don't."

"Nothing is what we know," Harry muttered, sitting down and starting to eat his sandwich. He crunched and munched and gulped more than Draco thought was strictly necessary, but at the same time, that he ate at the same table was a level of trust in Draco he never would have displayed a month ago. He'd be watching for secret potions or poisons instead. "Except that he makes globes, that he got an infection from undiluted blood-and even there, we have to consider whether Leah was lying to us-and that he hunts accompanied by nightmares."

Draco nodded and took a more delicate bite of his own sandwich. Perhaps he could model good behavior and Harry would follow him. "Exactly. And that means we should consider _why _he has those companions. Larkin's were the ghosts of his victims. Alto-we know how she made them."

Harry reached across the table and let his hand rest on Draco's elbow for a moment. Draco wiped at the crumbs clinging there when he let go, but he did dip his head in a brief, acknowledging nod.

"So what do the nightmares represent?" Draco asked, and took another bite. Harry seemed to have forgotten his sandwich. Draco wondered if he would have to model eating as well. "Why them? And why do they change when different people look at them, and from moment to moment?"

"I assumed we knew _that_," Harry said, blinking at him. "Because they're literal nightmares, of course. Everyone's dreams and their ideas of what's most frightening are different."

Draco paused, and then had to put the sandwich down. "I had thought of that, and dismissed it," he murmured, "because I took the nightmare description less literally than you did. You are brilliant, sometimes, Harry."

"Oh, _sometimes_," Harry said, and rolled his eyes. "Have to have that qualifying word in there, don't you?"

But he was flushing, and Draco took a moment to look into his red face before he turned away, bit into his sandwich again, chewed, swallowed, and said, "Well. That would explain one thing, at least, why they change. But what could have happened in Alexander's life to cause nightmares?"

"Too many things."

Draco turned back sharply, because something in Harry's tone caused him to think Harry would faint right there. Harry caught his gaze and shook his head, then straightened up and began to eat his sandwich again, as if to show that he could.

Draco decided to be gracious and forget-or appear to forget-about the personal information Harry had revealed. "You're right that that's still the wrong question to ask," he said. "Too many possible answers. What could we do that would narrow down the field and give us some real information?"

"Talk to Leah again, maybe." Harry licked his fingers, and Draco tossed him a napkin. Harry let it fall to the table, and grinned at him in what Draco would have had to be a Squib not to recognize as a challenge. "But we don't know that she'll tell us the truth, or that she knows everything. So she can't be our only source of information. Didn't Alexander have relatives? I thought that file said he did."

"It also said that they moved out of the country years ago, and no one has their current addresses." Draco leaned his head back and closed his eyes, struggling to remember. Something in the file _had _drawn his notice, hadn't it? Something, a name, that drifted under the surface of his mind. If Harry would leave him in peace for a few minutes, perhaps he could recall it.

Harry didn't comment. He settled for finishing his own sandwich and going to get another. Draco sighed out a small puff of air. Yes, they did work well together, if Harry could tell without speaking that he wanted silence.

_Forget about Harry for the moment. Concentrate and find some other way of pulling that name back to you._

He remembered something his mother had told him-and he did not like thinking about her, but in this case he pared his memory down to her words and the cool hand on his shoulder and nothing else, and immersed himself in it.

She had told him that he could make his mind like a glass palace, with a large foundation on the bottom that contained the memories he wouldn't access that much and well-lit rooms on the upper floors that he would walk into often. Nothing ever vanished from the mind; even Memory Charms covered over memories instead of destroying them. There would be ways down to the bottom rooms in a properly-organized mind. And of course pure-bloods always had those.

The memory of the file wasn't old. Draco drifted through the darkness of cellars he hadn't visited in years, and then fetched up against the name that blazed at him like a sunlit sword.

"Margolotta Rosier," he said aloud, and blinked, and found himself sitting across the table from Harry, who had paused with his sandwich in his hand but thankfully didn't have his mouth open and full of half-chewed food. "She was Alexander's mother. A pure-blood, and of a family that has some family connection with mine."

"On the Black or the Malfoy side?" Harry actually sounded normal as he said that. Draco studied him, but Harry shrugged and met his eyes fearlessly. "And does it matter that you've been disowned?"

"She doesn't necessarily know that if she's been out of the country for years," Draco said. "And she's connected to me on both sides, actually. Not the most prominent family in the world, but known for the Dark Arts and their dislike of Muggles, the Rosiers. She might have left to get away from the scrutiny she assumed would fall on her after the war. I can contact her."

"What kind of favor will you have to grant her?" Harry leaned forwards and lowered his voice. "I just don't want someone in the Ministry to find out and use that fact against you."

Draco couldn't help it. He reached out and grasped Harry's wrist, rubbing back and forth with his thumb to feel the pulse. Harry started and nearly pulled away, but then paused and let his hand rest there, passive.

"We won't let them find out," Draco said. "We don't have to put all the facts in the reports." He paused, and then stared at Harry. "_Have _you been?"

Harry rolled his eyes. "Of course not. Half the time they wouldn't believe what I managed to survive, anyway." His voice had a crispness that Draco hadn't heard before, but he moved on before Draco could ask him questions. "But let's make sure we make the call from a secure location not on Ministry premises. That way, they can't scold us for letting facts about this out in the open, anyway."

Draco nodded. "And now, the problem of the globes. I wonder if we haven't considered his flaw the wrong way around, as well."

"His flaw is making the globes, I thought," Harry said, licking at his front teeth. Draco glanced away. "What else could it be?"

"But he also seems to know who has the possibility of wandless magic, and I doubt he knew every one of his victims before he became one," Draco pointed out. "And Retror? The Unspeakables don't associate with anyone outside the Ministry, and we _know _Alexander didn't work there. How would he have known?"

"It must be some subtlety or spell in the globes themselves," Harry said, frowning. "Wouldn't that make sense? That they act like that, or explode, or can be used as weapons, against people with the potential to become-what he is. That's why so many people could handle them and not experience anything wrong, but other people had the dreams and the headaches."

Draco paused. Then he said, "That makes the most sense of anything we've thought of so far," to disguise the way that his chest seemed to flutter with the pounding of his heart. "And his flaw would be not only to create globes, but to create globes that do this."

"Whatever _this _is," Harry said, and tugged at his hair. "We still haven't figured that out. I thought he was attacking us because he wanted to save the people we hunt, but his independent attacks against others don't bear that out. But trapping them in their minds doesn't seem to be the goal, either. No one who's had the dreams that we've talked to has chosen to stay."

"Retror might," Draco had to point out. "Perhaps that's why he's in a coma and has stayed that way. We can't exactly wake him up right now to ask him, though."

Harry sighed. "And he might have had the dreams and exposure to the globes before, but we wouldn't know because the Unspeakables are so bloody secretive about everything. Even if he told someone else in the Department of Mysteries, they might or might not tell us." He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Draco thought about pointing out that he had crumbs in his eyebrows, and decided not to. That might be the kind of thing Harry wouldn't want to know right now. "So how are we going to figure that out?"

"You work on that while I interview Margolotta," Draco said firmly. "But, as you said, we need a secure location outside the Ministry."

Harry blinked. "My flat?" he offered. "It does have a Floo connection, and if someone tried to trace you back, well, my flat has wards on it that prevent most people from finding out that sort of thing."

"Yes," Draco said, more quickly than he wanted to, and without considering the reason for the quickness. He stood and cast a quick Cleaning Charm on the table, which made the shopgirl give him a blinking glance. Well, let her think he had done it out of the goodness of his heart and not because that made him more difficult to follow away from the table or work magic on anything he'd touched. "Lead the way."

* * *

Harry winced a little as he unlocked the door of his flat. He hadn't planned on company today-or any time soon, since he always went over to Ron and Hermione's house when he wanted to visit them-and he wondered what Malfoy, used to the spacious expanses of the Socrates Corps office and the Manor, would make of it.

It wasn't as if there were shirts strewn everywhere and crumpled, dirty Auror robes on the floor. It was more that Harry knew there was soot practically ingrained in the stones around the fireplace, and that he didn't have any furniture in the drawing room but a pair of rat-eaten chairs he'd found in a Muggle shop and liked the look of. The kitchen had a permanent, lingering smell of curry and, for some reason, bread. And the door to Harry's bedroom spent all its time closed and locked except when he was actually asleep in it, because no one needed to see as many photographs of Lionel as he had in there.

Draco stood in the doorway, looking around in a slow fashion that meant he would notice every detail. Harry winced again and cast an Obscuring Charm that should make the doorway to the kitchen look a little wider and better-lit. "The Floo powder's on the mantle," he said, and took off his cloak, then reached for Draco's.

Draco took it off himself, and for a moment Harry thought he would fold it and sit on it in preference to the dirty chairs. Then he smiled and handed it to Harry. "This is a charming place," he murmured, more graceful in his lie than Harry had sometimes seen him in the telling of some truths. "But I expected it would have more of _you _in it."

Harry snorted. "What? Like Orders of Merlin on the wall and Gryffindor colors?" Nothing in the flat was gold or red, and his Orders of Merlin spent all their time in a bottom drawer in his bedroom. He suspected the Ministry regretted ever giving them to him, with all the trouble he'd got into since he became an Auror.

"Like a picture of a Healer on the wall with darts in it," Draco said, and smiled more broadly at him. "Or files scattered about. I know that you take some home and read them there." He was staring at the mantle now, although it was perfectly ordinary, somewhat yellow wood. The jar holding the Floo powder was a bit odd for its surroundings, polished silver, but then, it had been a gift from Hermione.

"I don't care as much about the Healers as they do about me." Harry shrugged, to screw the knot of tension out of the shoulders, and hung up both their cloaks. "And I don't take files home all that often when I'm not trying to figure out the machinations of a crazy twisted."

Draco glanced up as the door shut and the wards engaged with a buzz that made the air around them shiver. "I'm surprised that you have ones that strong," he murmured.

Harry couldn't help it; he laughed. "_Really_?"

"On thinking about it, that's rather a stupid question, isn't it?" Draco leaned back against the wall and folded his arms, the only thing that showed he wasn't entirely at ease here. "Of course I should have realized that you would have personal enemies and possible twisted to keep off as well as those who might like to raise the Dark Lord. And then there's your general paranoia." His eyes lingered on Harry, with a weird intensity in them, as if he liked being able to look at Harry for as long as he wanted.

Harry stared back, then shivered and turned away, moving abruptly towards the kitchen. "I'm going to fix some tea and check on these files," he said, waving the files on the case they'd stopped by their office to find. "You can begin the Floo call if you want to."

Draco didn't move for some minutes, long enough for Harry to mostly boil the water for the tea and shuffle the files around on the table several times and cough loudly. Then Harry heard the clink of the silver jar as it opened, and the distinctive _whoosh _of the flames. Draco's voice was too low for him to make out the address called, though he reckoned it was the one belonging to someone who could tell him where Rosier was.

Harry folded his arms in front of him on the wall and beat his head against them gently. _Could you be more obvious, genius? He's going to decide you have a crush, and there's the end of the best partnership you could have right now._

He sighed and straightened. The only thing he could do was try to control himself around Draco and hope they got some work done on the case. Being too cool and aloof would probably destroy their partnership in a different way.

And he should remain firm on taking up that leave of absence. He needed time away from everything to meditate on his emotions and decide what they meant. A place with mountains and clear air and butterflies somewhere, that was the trick.

He sat down at the kitchen table and opened the first file, doing his best to imagine different purposes for the globes as he did so. _If I was a mad twisted who didn't get that way through study of the Dark Arts, what would I want to do to other twisted?_


	9. Clash of Personalities

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Nine-Clash of Personalities_

While Draco waited for Yelton to answer his call, he turned his head in several directions, absorbing as much of Harry's flat as he could.

There was a lot less there than he had expected. He had thought he would see multiple photographs of Vane on the walls, along with multiple photographs of Harry's friends, and perhaps case files on the tables. There would be more furniture, certainly. Harry would have a comfortable couch for sitting and far too many Gryffindor colors on said couch, the floor, and almost everything else Draco could imagine.

Instead, the flat was subdued. The walls were nearly bare except for a few photographs-which did indeed show Harry's friends, but not Vane-and a landscape panting with trees that loomed near the canvas and were poorly done in general, in Draco's opinion: just crowded brushstrokes of green, instead of depicting the individual leaves. The two chairs in the drawing room both had dust on them. Draco couldn't see any sign that someone had cooked a substantial meal in the kitchen in a long time.

In other words, it looked like a place no one spent much time in.

Draco paused, then shrugged. He had no reason to assume that that said something deep or profound about Harry. Someone entering his own home might have assumed that he had no relatives except his great-aunt, and they would be wrong. Draco simply had no other relatives that he wished to acknowledge.

But for now, he had to direct his attention elsewhere. Thomasina Yelton had finally deigned to answer her Floo, and she looked at Draco with the remote expression that had always made her face look too pinched and her silver-white hair resemble a helmet rather than a dignified sweep back from her temples.

"I am surprised to see you, Draco Malfoy," she said. "I had assumed that you would not contact me again after your disowning."

Draco smiled. Yelton was the record-keeper for a generation of pure-bloods, a compiler of genealogies and gossip, the sort who could recite a dozen different facts about anyone in the family tapestries she was aware of in instants. "I don't need to know anything about my family," he said, and then paused, the exact length of time necessary to intrigue someone like Yelton. "Well, perhaps that is not true, depending on how distant you consider the Rosier connection."

"Five intermarriages in the last six generations," Yelton said at once. "I would not call that distant." She leaned back in her specialized rocking chair and spent a moment regarding Draco. "Which member of the family do you need to reach?"

"Margolotta Rosier," Draco said. "I was told she had moved to France. Perhaps to escape the war. It does not matter if that is the case. I promise that the matter I wish to contact her about has nothing to do with that."

Yelton raised an eyebrow. "And nothing to do with her daughter, either?"

That confirmed a bit of uncertain information in the file, that Alexander had a sister. Draco raised an eyebrow and smiled and let the silence do the work for him. Yelton gave him a slow smile and a nod.

"It is not the greatest of connections, for either of you," she said. "But there is something _suitable _about a half-blood Rosier daughter for a disgraced Malfoy heir. Perhaps you will bring each other back into the wizarding world as you should be." She rattled off a long name that made Draco have to refrain from rolling his eyes. The further pure-bloods came down in the world, apparently, the longer they decided their Floo addresses should be.

"Thank you, Lady Yelton," Draco, and he knew that she knew that he knew she didn't deserve the title, but she smiled and tipped her head forwards, and then faded from the fire.

Draco hesitated when he was on the point of calling out the address, and looked around the room one more time. Harry didn't appear to have ventured out of the kitchen where he was sitting with the files, which meant Draco had time to look at a few objects more closely, if he wanted.

And there was one, sitting near him on the mantle, that he _did _want to look at. It was a small, slender book in a black leather cover, with a thin lock dangling from it on a chain. Draco reached for it, then hesitated and cast a spell that would tell him about any hexes or charms on it.

A deep blue glow settled into the book's cover and lingered there. Then letters appeared, using the blue glow to form themselves, but looking as though someone had stabbed them into being rather than written them with a quill.

_MY BOOK. STAY OUT._

Draco blinked and backed away, at the same moment as Harry ran out of the kitchen with his wand drawn. He skidded to a stop when he saw Draco there and looked around, apparently seeking the source of a ringing ward that Draco couldn't hear. He gave a small murmur that must have been the incantation to stop the ward and then glanced back at Draco.

"No one came through the fireplace and then turned themselves invisible right after they did that?" he asked.

Draco shook his head, glad he stood in such a way as to shield the cover of the book from Harry's eyes. He perhaps should admit what he had done, but as long as Harry didn't know where that specific ward had sounded-and how should he, with so many of them all over his flat?-then he would pretend ignorance. It was more important, in the middle of a difficult case, that nothing damage Harry's trust in him.

_And of course I would think that. But it doesn't make it less true._

"Right," Harry said, and sighed, and turned back towards the kitchen.

"Did you discover anything in the files?" Draco asked, because he hated for Harry to have come out here and then retreat with the most important part of the conversation undone, the questions unasked.

Harry turned around again, one eyebrow rising as though he expected to compete with Draco in the world championships. "Er...no?" he asked, and made it sound less like a question than it should have. "I've only been looking at them for a few minutes. Did your contact tell you something that made you think I should?"

"She confirmed that Alexander has a sister," Draco said. "Nothing more." He could have explained in detail about Yelton and the reasons she thought Draco was interested in Alexander's sister, but there was no reason to.

Harry only nodded, with such a blank expression that he might have guessed at the whole story or none of it, and went back to his table and his files.

Draco turned away from the tempting book and cast another handful of Floo powder into the fire, reciting the ridiculously long name that Yelton had mentioned. Honestly, it was good that he'd had some training in French pronunciation or he couldn't have said it. Never mind that part of it was Italian.

* * *

Harry did his best to ignore the weird interlude in the drawing room with Draco as he sat down in front of the file and clasped his head in his hands. He was going to ignore thoughts of Lionel and thoughts of the dream-world Alexander had offered him, too. He could do that if he _wanted _to.

The files continued to tell him nothing more than what he already knew. The strange, mild effects the globes had on a few of the people who touched them. The utter lack of effect on most people who did. Alexander's relatives having left the country, and his employment at Eleanor's Enchantments. The original theft, or entry into the shop. Nothing about the blood of twisted, of course, because that was something only Leah could have told them.

Nothing about a symbol, or difficulty with Healing magic, or long study of the Dark Arts.

Harry sighed and rubbed his forehead. If he couldn't concentrate on Draco, it seemed his mind would circle back to the idea that twisted might simply be wizards with wandless magic and an affinity for the Dark Arts which Leah had introduced them to. He pushed his chair back and considered the matter.

What would it mean, if the world was full of twisted, and the only ones that got arrested or killed were the ones who drew attention to themselves? Or the ones that weren't powerful enough to hide what they were and get attention deflected elsewhere? Larkin had been a minor man obsessed with Dark Lords, Healer Alto had been low in the hierarchy at St. Mungo's, and Alexander was nothing more than a Potions shop assistant. But if someone were to imply Harry Potter was twisted, then the Ministry would never act on the information. They might sack him, but killing him or arresting him would still cause enough outrage to be avoided.

_What about Draco?_

Harry clenched a hand in front of him on the table and grimaced. The problem, as he saw it, was that it really _might _fall either way, given Draco's heritage and connections and fate since the war. Some people would say that he was a good Auror, with an exemplary record, and a pure-blood whose family it wasn't worth angering. Other people would see his family's affiliation, or the fact that they'd rejected him, as enough reason to attack.

_Poor Draco. People who hate his family and people who like them would _both _have a reason to hate him. No wonder he doesn't have many friends outside the Aurors._

Harry scratched at his ear. If they released this new definition of twisted, then what would happen?

The Ministry would deny it, that was what. They had done the best they could to hush up even the Alto case, because it could have damaged the reputation of St. Mungo's. And that might be enough inducement for them to turn on the "Chosen One," come to think of it.

Not to mention, there were some twisted who did need to be arrested, if not killed. Perhaps not Alexander, but Alto had turned the people around her into lunatics, and Larkin hadn't cared who he hurt as long as he could achieve his goals. Not to mention the creature Harry had hunted during the case that killed Lionel. That was either a twisted or something else so Dark that the Ministry had thrown resources at it Harry had never seen for a case with a single criminal.

And there was the case Draco had worked on right before Socrates, and lost his partner over, that was still so sealed even Harry didn't have the right to see those files.

So where did the middle ground lie, in between releasing every twisted because they might be harmless to the population at large and arresting them or killing them all? The Ministry had chosen its side. Harry had to choose his.

He had killed one even before he took the Gina Hendricks case and watched that _thing _slaughter Lionel. Voldemort. That was the pattern the whole modern definition of twisted was based on, in fact. His companions had been the Death Eaters and Nagini, his symbol was the Dark Mark, and so on.

But most twisted never got that far, never became Dark Lords and never aspired to take over the world, except perhaps for Larkin. So perhaps using Voldemort as the pattern was a stupid idea and Harry should propose a new one.

Except that he had no idea where to start, and no idea if he owed it to the public to be open about what his visions of murders might mean. And did he have the right to tell everyone what Draco's talent to sense Dark magic meant, when he might not want the judging gaze of the public on _him_, either?

_If only I could talk to Alexander, _Harry thought wistfully, his fingers digging into his hair and scratching at his scalp, _and hear exactly what he intends to do, understand his motives and _know.

Then Harry raised his head and stared at the far wall.

He did have a way to talk to Alexander. At least, he did if he thought Alexander had been in his last vision, controlling the version of Lionel he had met there.

Draco might not like it. On the other hand, he might agree, because it would mean that they could finally settle the case and move on to something else, and he wouldn't have to make a decision that would involve telling anyone about his wandless magic.

Harry smiled and stood up, slapping the table for emphasis. He almost didn't care if he and Draco had a row about this idea (probably Draco would feel that Harry was risking his life without regard for the consequences again). It was still _doing _something, instead of sitting back while his mind chased itself in circles regarding morality and decisions that he didn't think he had the right to make anyway.

He had always had an itch to do things, and bad things happened when he thought too much, anyway. Look at the way his thinking about the similarities between Draco and Lionel had turned out. Now he thought he had a crush on Draco that was exactly the same as his crush on Lionel. And it couldn't be, or it was shallow if it was.

He would do things about that, and he would do something about Alexander, too. Or at least have a good time yelling at Draco.

* * *

"And you can't tell me anything about the nightmares he might have had as a child?" Draco kept his voice soft and lulling. "Please, Mrs. Alexander. I know I sound like an enemy, but if we know how to fight your son without wounding him, and if we know he's not actually dangerous, then we can bring him in more easily."

Margolotta Alexander-who had been Rosier when she married-looked at him with a soft, bitter smile. It wasn't all that different from Yelton's, though in other respects she was very different, with long dark hair and eyes that seemed to linger in the borderland between blue and deep purple.

"I know what you want," she said. She had said much the same thing in response to Draco's earlier, indirect attacks, which was what had made him risk the blunt words in the first place. "I know you've betrayed your own kind."

"By becoming an Auror?" Draco folded his arms and tilted his head to the side, this time flavoring his words with a sigh that he let her hear. He also might be able to anger her to the point where she couldn't control her emotions well and would tell him something in spite of herself. "I assure you there are pure-bloods among the Aurors."

"Our enemies control the Ministry," Margolotta said sharply. "Including those who want to see your family line end forever."

"At the moment, my family line is far more likely to end forever because my father has disowned me and made no move towards acquiring another heir," Draco said dryly. Lucius would be furious if he knew Draco had discussed private family business this openly, but that was another advantage to the disclosure, as far as Draco was concerned. "And if we're going to speak about purity of blood, marrying someone who's Muggleborn?" He arched a polite eyebrow and waited.

"My Richard is a half-blood, not a Muggleborn." But Margolotta's eyelashes trembled a bit, and she did look away.

"It hardly matters," Draco said. "You can think of this as a conversation between two blood traitors instead of two pure-bloods, if you want, Mrs. Alexander. I still want to know about your son's nightmares."

Margolotta spent a moment plaiting the fringe of the shawl draped around her shoulders. Draco wondered why she wore such a thing, when it was probably warmer in France than it was here, but did not intend to ask unless the answer seemed to matter. It could be for a sinister reason or a real one, and she was not the one he had contacted her to investigate.

"Reynard never had strange nightmares, or a strange number of them," Margolotta said abruptly, and looked up at Draco. Perhaps she thought a direct gaze would make her seem more honest. Draco watched her face anyway, looking for the signs of a lie. "He had some bad dreams, the way that all children do, and a normal number of anxiety dreams about failing exams or suddenly turning into a Squib overnight. But he never envisioned doing harm to people, or torturing them. You're mistaken if you think he would turn to Dark Arts without a good reason."

Draco checked a sigh. The more he investigated this, the more it seemed that Alexander might have _good _motives for becoming a twisted, and the less solid information he had.

But on the other hand, Margolotta had good reasons to lie, if she thought her son might go to prison, and if she considered Draco a traitor because he had become an Auror. Draco chose a different tactic, and looked Margolotta full in the eye as he spoke the words, because they were honest, in a way. To a smaller part of him than they would have been honest to a short time ago.

"Your son is a thief, at the moment. He broke into Eleanor's Enchantments to steal Potions ingredients. And he has cheated someone of his magic, and perhaps of his sanity, if he never wakes up from the coma he's in."

Margolotta stared at him, her pupils shrinking to small points. "Alexander never wanted to take away anyone's magic," she breathed. "He wouldn't have done it to someone who-was this man pure-blood?"

"His globes have affected half-bloods and pure-bloods and someone who might be Muggleborn alike," Draco said evenly. "He'll be arrested not for grand events, not even for overuse of the Dark Arts, but for petty and _common_ crimes. Is that the kind of legacy you want for your family?"

Margolotta turned her head away. Draco held back a sigh of relief this time. Margolotta was one of the old-fashioned pure-bloods who still thought family honor came before all else. And stealing magic, for someone like that, counted as a crime worse than murder, and to be arrested for doing something a Muggleborn might do was shame.

For a moment, Draco thought he would get somewhere important. Margolotta gazed deeply into some recess of memory Draco couldn't see, and her hand plucked again at the fringe of the shawl.

Then she lifted her head and stared at Draco, and said, "I cannot help you. My answer remains the same. Reynard had no unusual nightmares. He-he wished to do many things that I did not wish him to, hence why he had such an inglorious career as a Potions shop assistant." She bit her lip and sighed, and Draco resisted the temptation to say something about how inglorious such a career really was, compared to his later crimes. Harry would have said something like that just then, he knew, and lost her. "But he showed no inclination to make globes like the ones you describe. He wasn't an artistic person, in general. He showed no inclination to steal magic. I know nothing that can help you, and no reason he should have become a Dark wizard. Nor did he ever display wandless magic. He was an ordinary boy in so many ways, and the only reason he was special or important was as my son."

Draco considered her face, her hands, her tone, her inflection. As far as he could tell, she was telling the truth.

It was frustrating, because it destroyed the promise of secrets about Alexander that Draco had been sure they were going to gather, but honest.

Draco half-closed his eyes and said with as much politeness as he could muster, "Thank you, Mrs. Alexander. That's all we can ask you for. Would you be willing to come back to England, if you had to, and testify in court that you had no idea your son could become such a monster?"

"Yes."

And some of the pure-bloods who might lie to protect a family member would have been unwilling to do even that, Draco thought. They would hesitate, then defend themselves first, and do only what they could do without risk. But Margolotta sounded as if she was exactly what she portrayed herself to be, a concerned mother who had offered up what little information that might give him an insight into her son.

"Thank you," Draco said, and other necessary formalities, and concluded the Floo call feeling more helpless than ever.

He turned around to find Harry behind him, beaming like a madman, and smiled despite the tightening in his stomach. There was always the hope, small though it was, that Harry had turned up something useful in his scan of the files.

"Well?" Draco asked. "All his mother could tell me was that she didn't know of any nightmares that he had and no motive that he might have for behaving like this. She didn't even seem to think that he had any talent for creating globes that might have manifested as his flaw."

"I heard that part," Harry said, waving his hand a little. Draco bristled, but held his peace for the moment. He would let Harry explain his idea first. "But I was thinking. The only one who could tell us everything we need to know is Alexander."

Draco rolled his eyes. "Brilliant. Why didn't _I _think of that? Too bad that we can't persuade him to talk to us."

"But perhaps we could," Harry said. "If I had one vision where I was speaking to him, or he was behind the Lionel that I _thought _I was speaking to, then I might have another. I might be able to contact him again that way, and ask him why under the guise of pretending to believe him, of needing just a bit more persuasion." He beamed again.

Draco didn't have to think before he replied. "No."

Harry bared his teeth at him. "Can _you _think of anything else? Everything turns up dead ends. Even Leah might not know more than she already told us, and it's still illegal to use Veritaserum on someone who refuses it. This is the best way to get our answers and stop him, or those globes, from hurting anyone else. Or keep him from vengeance by someone else, like Retror's family, if he really is innocent."

Draco smiled at him. "Oh, I agree we need to do that. And we will, as soon as you come up with some plan that doesn't involve risking your life."

"I risk my life every day I'm in the field," Harry said, more quietly than Draco had expected. "If you want to establish a Legilimency bond to my mind to watch over me while I do this, or perform it in Healer Estillo's office, or any other condition, I'm willing. But I think this is the only chance we have, Draco. Unless you can think of something better in the next five minutes."

Draco gritted his teeth. He hated this. Harry was talking about putting his sanity, not just his life, at risk, and perhaps his magic, if Retror's case was any indication. Did he not care about that?

_No. He's just starting to care that you care, which is why he'll let you oversee it. But I don't think you can make him go back on this, and he'll just do it behind your back if you don't agree._

It was a sign of trust that Harry had let him know. Draco reckoned, grudgingly, that he could extend that trust back and permit the plan.

"We'll do it in Healer Estillo's office _and _with a Legilimency bond," he said. "If you're comfortable letting me into your mind."

Harry's smile was sweet enough to steal his breath. "No one else I'd rather," he said, and for a moment, his hand arched out and touched Draco's.

Draco tried not to let that touch influence him unduly as they made their plans, but suspected that he was failing.


	10. Establishing Mental Bonds

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Ten-Establishing Mental Bonds_

"You are sure that you wish to do this?"

Harry smiled at Healer Estillo and leaned back in his chair. "I think I have to," he answered. "Facing the vision that Alexander sent me could help me move past my grief over Lionel and finally learn what parts of my past are simple projections of my mind and what parts aren't."

Draco stared at him from the side. Healer Estillo did the same thing, but more gently. Harry ignored the way that Draco's eyes narrowed the longer he went on looking. He knew that his words probably sounded glib, but he couldn't help that. That was the truth, and other than the fact that Draco knew about his feelings for Lionel and Healer Estillo didn't, they were working from exactly the same base of knowledge.

"I wish that I could feel you were doing it for your own healing and not for the sake of your job," Estillo said, tilting her head to the side as if the new angle would open up new views on Harry. "One is more important than the other."

Harry sighed. "That's the kind of thing people say to me all the time, and I don't understand why," he murmured, deciding that he might as well be honest. "My job is part of my life. Some people seem to think that it isn't, that my 'life' only exists when I'm in the flat or talking to my friends. Or when I'm in a Healer's office, though that occurrence is pretty rare now," he added, hoping to draw a smile from Estillo. She just watched him. Harry shook his head. "This is all part of my life. My job is just the most important part, that's all. Solving this case will help me calm down and focus on the other parts, if you really think that I should."

"That's why I am concerned," Healer Estillo said quietly. "You are putting your concentration on those other factors further and further off in the future. Why should I trust that you will concentrate on them at all when the future gets here?"

Harry shrugged. "I have Draco in my life this time. And I can make an appointment with you for next week. And I'll be establishing the mental bond with Alexander here, under your supervision. That's all the guarantees that you can really ask for."

Draco leaned forwards, with a faint smile on his face. Harry eyed him. He knew the context and contents of that smile, and neither could fool him now.

"The mental bond is technically with _me_," Draco said. "I'm the one who'll follow you along on this mad venture and watch over your safety. You have to establish the bond with Alexander through other means."

Harry sighed. "Yes, sorry. I was only making the point that it would occur under the Healer's supervision, so that she could monitor me and voice her concerns if she needs to."

"And it'll occur _with me._"

Harry didn't know if Healer Estillo had any idea why Draco whispered those words the way he did, with bright eyes and bright teeth and a huge smile on his face. He didn't care, though. Certain things were public for the Healer because they had to be, but Harry knew others would remain private. He stared back at Draco, and Draco finally snorted and glanced away as though that had been his own idea.

"Both true," Healer Estillo said, with what probably seemed like an excess of diplomacy to her, given that they were both partners. "Now. Have you ever established a bond like this before, Auror Potter?"

Harry shook his head, and faced her, glad that they were about to begin the technical instruction. Of course he trusted Draco not to blurt out secrets that Harry had confided to him, as much because Draco liked being the only one to know them as because Harry trusted him in general. But sometimes, he had the weird feeling that they were in a competition, that Draco was focused on yanking something away from him while Harry tried to hang onto it.

_And there are things that you won't trust him with because you don't want him to find out about them._

Harry gritted his teeth and stared so hard at Healer Estillo that she paused in her instructions to ask him if he was all right. Harry nodded, and then tried to relax his mouth and the muscles in his neck. They would have only one real chance to do this right, and Harry was determined that any failure would not come from _him_.

* * *

Draco tapped his wand against the heel of his palm and smiled into the air. He could feel Harry beside him, the shape of his body, how he shifted against the chair and repeated the words the Healer told him to repeat, and he listened to that more than the words. These were only the incantations that Harry would have to repeat. The words Draco would have to know were far simpler, and he had looked them up last night, after he left Harry's flat.

It didn't matter how eager Harry was to talk to Alexander. Draco would be holding a leash on the entire interaction, and he would pull on it if he needed to and yank Harry out before he would allow him to go into danger.

_To do that might cost you his trust._

Draco snorted through compressed lips. Better Harry's trust than his life. And at this point in their partnership, Draco was sure that they could build the trust back up. But how long would it take Harry to overcome injuries and Draco to overcome his rage at watching Harry put his life uselessly in danger yet again? Far longer.

"You are well, Auror Malfoy?"

Healer Estillo's voice never held any of the creeping contempt that some other people's did when they addressed him by his title. For that reason alone, Draco could have worked with her. He inclined his head. "Merely waiting for the moment when I need to speak my part of the incantation, Healer," he said.

Estillo believed him and went back to instructing Harry. She had to regain Harry's attention, though, because Harry was staring at Draco. Draco met Harry's gaze and fluttered his eyelashes in a parody of innocence that made Harry start and flush and glance away.

Well. Wasn't _that _interesting?

Draco twirled his wand beneath his fingers and whistled under his breath, listening to more of Estillo's explanations now. They could be important to saving Harry's life and sanity, and that was what he was doing here: invading the mental bond, and Harry's conversation in vision with Alexander, in the first place to ensure that he came back alive.

Draco felt the way he did before going into battle, at least if he had some notion of the battle. Alert and relaxed at the same time, ready to burst into motion the moment some enemy leaped at him.

This was important to him in the way that nothing had been in a long time, unless he counted his expulsion from his family. He had stood his ground then and ignored the multiple temptations to turn his back on his Auror career, including the money his father could offer him, and he would do the same thing now.

Only now the temptation was-what? To trust Harry too much? To not watch over his mind as he went to talk with Alexander? Draco suspected he would have a hard time defining their shape, even to himself.

Well. It didn't much matter what they were, not as long as he could fight them. And he _would _fight them. He would do exactly what he was here to do, and no more: watch over Harry's conversation. He would gain the information about the case they needed and pull Harry out if he thought the conversation was too dangerous.

And he would not go looking for extra secrets in Harry's mind.

No matter the temptation.

* * *

Having the Legilimency bond anchored in his mind was odd. Harry had the feeling of someone standing by his shoulder with a hand on it, now and then bending down to whisper in his ear. He had to keep himself from turning around as he closed his eyes and tried to think of the best way to contact Alexander.

Well. He had already been in the vision twice, thanks to the globes, and the second time had seemed much more personal, but also false. Why not build that vision in his mind and see if Alexander would come into it?

That was a suggestion Healer Estillo had given him, but Harry felt it was the first time it had made _sense _to him, sense on a level congruent with his bones and his blood. He forced himself to remember the lake and the grass around it from the first vision, and then the house from the second, and how Lionel had sat, and the way Alexander had made his eyes glow, and the tones of his voice...

With a twisting sensation, he felt something wake up inside him. It could have been a memory of Lionel, it could have been a remnant of magic from the globes, but whatever it was, it catapulted him straight back into the second vision. Once again he sat in the bed and Lionel sat in the chair in front of him.

The bond that linked his mind to Draco's was still there. Harry took a breath that he hoped Lionel-Alexander wouldn't read as one of relief, and turned to face Lionel.

The dark eyes were had a glow of tears now. Harry winced, and forced himself to ignore that.

"Why are you doing this?" he asked Alexander quietly. "Putting one man into a coma and giving others dreams, even intense dreams where you try to persuade them to stay here forever, doesn't make sense. Do you hate the twisted? Do you want to hunt them? Do you want them dead, or free? Tell me."

Lionel paused, and then said, "I don't know what you're talking about." His mouth moved too stiffly, though, and his voice was the most unlike Lionel's that Harry had heard it be yet.

"You do," Harry said, and leaned forwards. "And we know that you're targeting people who could be twisted. People who have wandless magic like you, people who could be seen as practicing the Dark Arts if more of the public realized the truth about them. I assume you don't think it's fair that the Socrates Aurors are treated so differently from the rest of the twisted? Is that true?"

Alexander's eyebrows seemed to flatten out, and his eyes lightened, the color drifting towards brown. "You still have no idea what you're talking about," he said softly, and this time, his voice reminded Harry of a rattlesnake's hiss. "You assume that I want to kill or arrest someone, or see them all free. That's not true. The blood gave me _understanding._ It taught me what the twisted can do, and it taught me that they could be dangerous."

Harry nodded. "So you do want to persuade us to stay here in dreams for the rest of our lives?" It was interesting, he thought, that Alexander still refused to refer to himself as a twisted.

"You do not understand," Alexander said steadfastly. "You are not in danger of becoming a twisted, even though your partner is."

Harry thought he felt a jerk of anger from the back of his mind, where the bond with Draco hovered. He gritted his teeth and hoped that the movement hadn't revealed Draco to Alexander. So far, his attempts to target Draco had failed. Harry hoped to keep it that way.

"Whether one becomes a twisted has nothing to do with whether someone has the Dark Mark," he said. "You can't think that I'm better than Auror Malfoy just because I fought Voldemort."

Alexander blinked. Then he laughed. The sound was childlike, and made Harry wonder what he had been like before he had drunk the undiluted blood.

"That has nothing to do with it," he said. "You _were _a threat, and perhaps more than most, because your reputation would hide the madness that would otherwise make you hunted down. But now you are not."

"I don't intend to stay here in the visions for the rest of my life," Harry said, and tried to keep his voice calm and gentle, so that Alexander would have no reason to attack him. "If you think that, then you don't understand that my life is more than Lionel. Yes, for a long time I felt I would die without him. I don't feel that way now."

A bolt through the bond at the back of his mind. Harry had no idea why, unless Draco was simply glad to hear him announce that his life didn't revolve around Lionel. He tried to shrug the idea off. Draco didn't have any stake in the matter, either, no right to say that Harry should do certain things.

_He's your partner. He has that much of a stake._

It didn't mean that he wanted more than that, though. Once again, Harry reminded himself to focus on the danger in front of him and not the one that might be standing in the back of his mind.

"What makes a twisted?" Alexander snapped, and started to list the characteristics before Harry could respond. "Dark Arts ability. No Healing magic. A flaw-the wandless magic that seems to mark out so many of you. The symbol that's left behind on the sites that the twisted attacks. The companions that follow them slavishly or are called into being by the actions of the twisted."

"Then you must know that there is a difference even there, between what the official list says and what reality proclaims," Harry murmured. "You are twisted, but you don't have the symbol. You could perhaps say that you don't have some of the other characteristics, either, because you didn't study the Dark Arts for long enough to be driven mad-"

"I know all about potential twisted." Lionel's face looked fully like Alexander's now, and he bent forwards, flushing with something Harry thought he would probably characterize as righteous fury. "And I've stopped you. I've _stopped _you. You'll never be dangerous again, because you're stopped."

Harry blinked. Then he clenched his hands. He had an idea what Alexander meant, although from the way Draco buzzed in the back of his head, he didn't think the realization had reached his partner yet.

"Your first globe," he whispered. "I _felt _different when I woke up and cast my first spell after that. You took my ability to see visions of murders from me, didn't you? You plugged up my flaw."

Alexander smiled, and this time, he looked like a satisfied parent. "Yes," he murmured. "You have no idea what you would have become if I hadn't removed the temptation. But you're safe now. You _have _to have a flaw to become a twisted. The flaw is what the blood gave me. And once your flaw is gone, you're not going to become a twisted no matter what happens. I haven't got to your partner yet, and the others who were touched by my globes didn't renew the contact or have as much as you, but you're healed. So is Retror. So will the others be."

Harry shook his head. He felt as though something thick was in the middle of his throat, blocking his words and possibly his breathing.

He should have seen it before. Of course, since Alexander hadn't tried to murder anyone, there hadn't been a particular need for his visions on this case, and so he might not have missed them until something happened that they should have warned him about.

But he had felt cleaner, lighter, different in some way, when he cast that first spell after being unconscious. That _had _meant something. His flaw, Dark magic by definition, was gone.

"What did you do to Retror?" he asked, because that was still information they needed and he thought he would need time to deal with the implication that someone could simply remove someone else's flaw without further contact than the brush of a globe.

"His flaw was heightened senses," Alexander said calmly. "I could not remove the flaw without also removing his consciousness. It was very resistant. So he is now in a coma, and he will remain there until the flaw vanishes from his core. Keep him unconscious long enough, and it should happen."

Harry shook his head. So Alexander was insane in his own way, and whether or not he killed people, still dangerous. "Are you listening to what you're saying? You're practically keeping him lifeless. He might die if he stays under long enough or the flaw never vanishes."

"But he will not be a twisted," Alexander said. "So he cannot endanger himself or others by the use of the flaw. That is the price we must pay."

The bond in the back of Harry's head was twanging urgently by now. He didn't know why; all he knew was that Draco hadn't made an attempt to yank him out of the vision yet, which he could have done if he wanted to. So Harry pursued the conversation. "And what are you going to do about your own flaw? I don't think the globes can neutralize _you_."

Alexander smiled. "When I am done removing the flaws from every twisted in the world, then my last globe will take away my ability to produce new globes. I know and am looking forward to the end. Do not think you can persuade me to give up my activities before then. I am dangerous, yes, but I will end the danger when I am done."

Harry hissed. "And what happens if the flaw is something that can _help _people? I prevented people from dying because of my visions! Or at least took revenge on their murderers for them."

"It doesn't matter," Alexander said. "You are a twisted. The twisted always end up evil. I plan to keep my own flaw as long as I have to, and then dispose of it. You would continue down the path into darkness, and someday end up as a threat. So you must be stopped. And the same applies to your partner, and all the others who have flaws that could make them into twisted."

"You'll never locate them all," Harry said quietly. "All the ones who have flaws and never use them, all the ones who have them and never realize it, all the ones who have them and never tell anyone else. And what happens after you're dead? What about the people who will be born then, and not know what twisted are because you've killed them all, and have no effective way to resist their flaws turning them evil?"

Alexander's smile faltered. Then he said, "I cannot worry about the future. I can only worry about what happens in my own lifetime." But he stared into the corners as though his fears were rats creeping into them.

Harry snorted. "You seemed pretty bloody concerned about the future a minute ago. What happens if some of the twisted you find are children? How can you identify them all, anyway?"

"My globes will react-"

"But someone with a flaw might not touch your globes. And now that the Unspeakables and the Aurors know about them, they can contain you." Harry bent forwards. "It doesn't matter if we get taken off the case, you know, or if the Socrates Corps is dissolved. They'll just hunt you down and kill you with someone else. You'll never succeed. The wizarding world is too big, and there are always other twisted out there, and you're one man."

Alexander lunged at him, and a globe gleamed in his hand.

Harry raised a hand in instinctive defense, though he wasn't sure what he would have done had Alexander actually hit him. Instead, the world seemed to dissolve around him in a swirl of colors like the ones inside the globes, and then he was flying through space in the reverse of the twisting sensation that had brought him here.

_Twisting. Twisted. I hope that Draco didn't hear that pun from my thoughts._

He found himself landing back in Estillo's office before he was ready, and opening his eyes with a gasp. Draco bent over him, holding out his wand, although Harry could see Estillo rising to her feet, probably to cast some of the diagnostic charms Mind-Healers used. They discovered possessions and decided whether the mind was properly located in the body, among other things.

"You're all right?" Draco's eyes were bright and intent, and his hands sped along above Harry's limbs even before his wand traced them with magic, his head tilted to the side as though he wanted to get all the glimpses of Harry, rather like Estillo before he went into the trance. "You're all right."

Harry nodded. "I'm not wounded." Then he remembered what Alexander had already done to him, and scowled. "But the bastard took part of my magic away, and I want it back."

"We have to discover how to recover it, clearly," Draco murmured, and then leaned back in his own chair to let Estillo get to Harry with _her _magic, but kept staring at Harry.

"What?" Harry asked, scrubbing at his face and wondering if he had brought some traces back of Alexander after all.

Draco shook his head, and then began repeating the substance of the conversation to Estillo, probably to fix the concepts in his own head better. Harry leaned back and turned his own thoughts in a new direction.

_The blue-eyed twisted. I wonder if he wants to stop Alexander. He wanted to stop Alto when she was making new twisted. Someone who wants to kill them off, or make them impossible, would probably catch his interest, as well._

_ And how in the world am I going to get my flaw back?_

* * *

Draco was glad that he had learned to detach his brain from his words when he was making Auror reports, and say one thing while thinking about something else entirely different. It gave him the ability, now, to look at Harry and know the truth, while his mind bubbled and surged back and forth inside his skull, and his heart beat as though he was going to run out of the room.

He had heard Harry's conversation with Alexander, and that was important. But he had also found something else, something he hadn't looked for; he had sensed the thought drifting by and drew it in while waiting for the conversation between Harry and Alexander to turn to answers.

And the thought concerned him, and it was brightly-colored, and he could not help but read it.

Harry was in love with him, at least as much as he had been in love with Vane. Or Draco thought so. Or Harry thought so, and had communicated the conviction of his thoughts to Draco.

And Draco thrummed with silent excitement, endured the occasional puzzled glances that Harry gave him, and pondered what the hell he was going to do with his new knowledge.


	11. Labyrinths

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Eleven—Labyrinths_

"Now that we know what he's doing, we have to figure out how to stop him."

Draco, seated on the edge of his desk in a pose that Harry hadn't ever seen him adopt before, swung one leg and snorted. "Well, _obviously, _Potter. But so far, we don't have any idea of how to do that, do we?"

Harry stared at him. Draco raised his eyebrows, which meant Harry was being obvious about it, and he looked away with his cheeks flushing.

He knew it would sound stupid if he said anything, and that the important things to focus on at the moment were Alexander and the case. It was just—since they had come back to the office, he had thought something was off about Draco, as if he had seen something in Harry's mind that drove his emotions higher. He did things like sit on his desk, and swung his legs when he was usually so still, and stared at Harry with a strange shine in his eyes, as though he had discovered a secret inner Harry made of chocolate.

_And that's a _really _stupid idea. You don't even know if he likes chocolate. _Harry turned his attention back to his notes, which he'd written down from Draco's much better recollection of the conversation with Alexander. "Fine. I think the best thing we can do is offer him the bait he most wants—you, in this case."

A pause, and then Draco laughed. "We'll make a Slytherin of you yet, Harry."

_And that's another thing. _Harry could be wrong, since he hadn't really suggested it before, but he'd thought Draco would complain about having to play the part of bait. Instead, Draco gave him another glance that swept him from foot to head, and then a faint, secretive smile. Harry gave up on trying to understand him for the moment and plunged ahead. "He's obsessed with destroying your flaw as well as mine. Give him a chance to think that he can, and he'll charge in."

"Not if he knows that you're protecting me," Draco retorted, and drew his legs up towards himself. "He knows that he can't face you in open battle, and that using more globes on you now wouldn't have an effect."

"I don't know if that matters so much to an insane man," Harry began, and then gave up when he saw the intense glare Draco leveled at him. "But yeah, you're right, seeing me out in the open would probably tip him off that he might not win the fight. And I don't know if he would believe that I could possibly have turned my back on you and be agreeing with him or something."

"I don't know of anyone who would ever believe that you'd betrayed me."

Harry started and glanced up. Draco was leaning forwards, one hand braced beside himself on the desk, his eyes even more intense now. Harry stifled the urge to ask him if he had something in his eye, and nodded. "Not anyone who knows anything about how our partnership works, at least," he said. "I know I had a few people at the beginning ask me how I could work with a Death Eater and like it."

He would have gone on, but Draco's eyes were by now shining so fiercely that Harry thought they might fall out of his head. He pulled back his sleeve inch by inch, so that the Dark Mark emerged into the light slowly. Harry's eyes darted to it, and then back to Draco's face.

"Does it disgust you, Harry?" Draco's voice had descended a note or two, and Harry felt the hair standing up on the back of his neck.

And the stirring between his legs.

_No. Damnit! This is the part where we should be focusing on the case, not on the fact that I might like to shag him!_ Harry glanced elsewhere and shook his head. "It's part of you," he said. "A reminder of what happened in the days during the war when we couldn't really control our fates. Just like my scar is part of me, and a reminder of Voldemort."

If Draco flinched at the name, Harry couldn't see it. He remained silent for a few moments, though, and when he spoke his voice was thicker and lower. "I see. You _claim _that, yet you can't even look at me."

"That's not true," Harry snapped, and turned back, resolutely looking at the faded Mark. It didn't look as faded as he thought it might have, that was true, but it wasn't like he would ever seriously think Draco was scheming to bring back Voldemort. "I like you a lot, Draco. You're my friend and my partner."

Draco slid down from the desk and took a step towards him. His eyes still had that intense burn that Harry didn't understand. "You glanced away the minute I revealed it. And the Mark is the source of my flaw. Excuse me for thinking that perhaps you thought _I _was flawed, too, or less than perfect."

Harry curled his lip. "Look me in the eye and say that."

* * *

Draco glanced up and held Harry's gaze—a gaze that seemed inclined to flinch away from him much more than it should since they had come out of Healer Estillo's office. Draco didn't think Harry suspected what he had seen about his crush, or he would have stammered a good deal more and made up any excuse to avoid being alone with Draco.

_Perhaps he's confused by the way I'm behaving._

That was understandable. And Draco had no intention of revealing that he knew yet, not when Harry considered his own feelings shallow and untruthful. Draco would prefer to be with someone who actually wanted him instead of a reflection of a dead partner, or someone who was trying to drive him from his mind. He would test Harry a bit and see whether either one was true.

Looking into those green eyes, now focused steadily and unwaveringly on him, Draco smiled. Harry's attention blew through him like a clean, bracing wind, and he reached out and laid a hand on Harry's shoulder in reward and response. "You have no idea what you do to me when you look at me like that," he murmured.

Harry started, and then whirled away from Draco, his blush as fierce as his gaze had been, and shuffled through the papers on the desk. "We have to come up with a way to catch Alexander," he murmured. "You as bait, fine. Where do you think we should set this up, and how?"

Draco paused. _That _was an interesting reaction, wasn't it? Harry didn't seem to know what to do with a partner who returned his feelings.

Well. Draco was going to show him, eventually, that he _did _and Harry need not be ashamed of that. But he would wait and back off if that meant he could have a Harry who was comfortable around him.

"I think that we should choose ground that he thinks of as home ground, but that we've thoroughly investigated and trapped first," he said, and watched as Harry cocked his head. Draco smiled, enjoying being the one who could reveal the important information for once. "Leah's shop."

* * *

"There's nothing else you want to tell us about Alexander?"

Harry kept his voice vague, a soothing drone, and even stared at the wall behind Leah's chair as if he wasn't interested in her answer. She snorted, seemingly not fooled by his antics, and stood up to come to the door of the cell, clutching at the bars in the small window tightly. Harry refocused on her eyes.

"What I did was my own business," Leah said quietly. "The twisted I used were compensated for their blood, and I never _encouraged _Reynard to drink it undiluted. You should let me go."

"You know that using human blood in potions is illegal in any case, Ms. Anderson," Harry said, and then paused. Something about what she had just said was bothering him. If she left him in silence a moment longer, he might figure it out.

And then he did. He straightened up and stared at her. "How did you find the twisted that you took the blood from?" he demanded. "I don't think they were actually telling everyone around them about their wandless magic in time for you to hear about it before the Ministry did, and wandless magic doesn't always indicate a twisted, anyway."

Leah's eyes closed, and she turned her head away. Her hands tightened on the bars, and for a moment, Harry thought she would try to break out of her cell. But no, it was only that her breath came faster and faster, and a moment later, she sagged back into the chair she had risen from.

Harry watched her in silence, and waited. He could feel some of the same tremors invading his muscles, and his lip curling back in spite of himself. Leah glanced at him once, and then away, and if she was frightened of his half-snarl, then Harry would go on frightening her as much as he could.

"You don't understand what it was like," Leah whispered. "Trying to keep the shop competitive, trying to make sure that our prices were high at some times and low at others—my mother left me the shop, I never had the genius that she did for negotiating, and we paid too much for our supplies—"

"You have a gift, don't you," Harry said. "Or should I use the terminology that I'm sure Alexander would want me to, and say _a flaw? _You can find other twisted."

Leah hunched her shoulders up and said nothing.

"And that's one reason why Alexander broke into the shop the way he did," Harry continued, his voice lowering. "I should have thought of that. Vengeance against someone who made him take the undiluted blood, I thought, when we found out about _that_. But he seems very focused otherwise, with his goal on destroying twisted. Why come after someone whom he had to know wasn't a twisted and might get him caught because of what she could tell us about him? Why _toss a globe _at her? You're one of us."

Leah said utterly nothing, twisting some of her hair into a thick braid in front of her. Harry shook his head.

He wasn't sure what made him ask what he did next. Perhaps simply the similarity between Leah and someone else he was thinking about. "Did you ever see someone's eyes turn blue and a twisted voice address you out of their mouth?"

Leah turned her head away, and now she was shuddering and pressing one fist into her mouth as if to muffle cries. Harry stood up and took a step back from the bars. Shit. All he needed now was to hurt her and be accused of mistreating a witness, a crime that there was usually no coming back from.

"You can't talk about him," Leah whispered. "Don't do that. Don't talk about him. That's how he _finds _you."

"He showed up possessing someone in the Auror Department when I'd never heard of him," Harry said grimly. "And he's showed up in other cases before this, too. Even this one, possessing an Unspeakable. Who is he? What's his flaw?"

"You can't," Leah whispered. "If he knew—if he knew about me, then do you think he would leave me alive?"

Harry paused and thought about that, and when he did, he could see the danger she was shuddering over. The blue-eyed twisted could vanish and come back again as much as he wanted as long as nothing could locate his physical body. But Leah, with her gift of finding other twisted, might be able to do so.

"Fine," he said. "But in exchange, you are going to tell us everything you know about the shop and the attractions it might still have for Alexander."

Whimpering, Leah wiped away her tears. "Fine," she said. "If you can _protect _me. Leave me in this cell. It's safer than anywhere else you might take me, anyway."

Harry wasn't sure about that, but he had already said enough to hurt and frighten her. He set about making a list of all the potential dangerous wards on the shop and the explosive or poisonous ingredients, confident that Draco would know more about what to do with them than he did.

* * *

"What do you think?"

Draco hated the way he turned to Harry on his heel as though seeking approval, but Harry didn't laugh at him or seem to think it was wrong that he did so. He smiled at Draco, and his smile made Draco flush as if he'd been drinking strong wine.

Harry didn't seem to notice _that, _either, but Draco was growing used to his obliviousness. Harry accepted disapproval and criticism from the Auror Department and guilt from himself over Vane's death. The idea that his positive attention could be important for someone else on the same level didn't occur to him.

So Draco stood back as Harry investigated the wards Draco had wrapped around the shop. Harry did hesitate over the one nearest the door, looking back at Draco. "Do you think we should use this one? It's Dark, and if word of that gets out…"

"How would it get out?" Draco asked calmly. "I've put enough Repelling Charms on the shop to make the neighbors feel they're swimming if they get near it, and it's not as though we'll tell anyone."

Harry frowned at him. "But we're going to take Alexander alive if we can, and he might tell someone."

Draco chuckled and took a step forwards, unable to resist the temptation to reach out and let his hand glance off Harry's shoulder. "You still don't understand, do you?" he asked softly. "We're allowed to use Dark magic in our pursuit because we're Socrates Aurors. I know that you've done the same thing on occasion. And we have permission to kill Alexander. Capturing him is a last resort."

He had expected many reactions. He didn't expect Harry's mouth to tighten and for him to turn and face the far wall.

"What is it now?" Draco snapped. He felt the clenching, seething emotion in the center of his belly, and wished that there was some way that he could turn it on and off when he needed it. If Harry resisted giving him the attention he wanted, then it would become a liability, Draco's craving for it, instead of a pleasure.

"We're part of the same group as Alexander," Harry said, voice so quiet that Draco didn't know he would have heard him if every part of his being hadn't been focused on that. "Twisted, just like him. How can we justify killing him when we know what he is—what we are—and that the Ministry's whole scheme of classifying twisted is flawed? Excuse the pun," he added, before Draco could take him to task about it.

Draco reached out and let both his hands rest on Harry's shoulders. Of all things that might come between them, this was the last he had expected.

"We're not the same," he said. "Yes, we share a few of the same characteristics, but we knew there were variations even in that category, given the differences between people like Alexander, Alto, and Larkin." Harry reached back and squeezed Draco's hand when he mentioned Alto, which made Draco half-close his eyes before he could continue. "We haven't gone after other people in the way that Alexander has. We haven't tried to kill them simply _because _they fit the definition of twisted. We have to have a better reason than that. And we're not insane."

"Sometimes I feel that way," Harry muttered, but he was relaxing under Draco's touch. Draco increased the weight of his hold, moved closer. Harry half-turned his head back towards him, and Draco had to resist the temptation, now, to caress the side of his throat he could see.

"But you're not," Draco whispered. "And killing or capturing Alexander doesn't make you evil, doesn't make you a traitor, if that's what you fear." He gave in and slid his thumb down the side of Harry's throat, after all. Harry's eyes fluttered shut, but he made no motion to pull away. "We're not the same."

Harry gave a shallow grunt and then stepped away from him, nodding to the ward coiled around the door. "You realize that might end the battle before it begins?"

Draco paused, then smiled. If Harry wanted to accept that he was right and change the subject without further conversation, then that was all right with him. It was certainly better than the battle that they might have had otherwise. "Yes, I know. But that would be all to the good. We know why Alexander is doing this, and we don't need to know more."

"Other than how to get my flaw back, and how to awaken Retror."

Draco shrugged and nodded at the same time. He rather thought the effect of the globes would end with Alexander's death, and he was more interested in the way that Harry avoided speaking the truth Draco could see burning in his every gesture, now. _Why _not admit that he fancied Draco? Yes, yes, he might think his emotions were only a crush, but he had found the courage to admit his other crush to Vane.

"We'll find out," he said, and then Harry gave him a warm smile of the kind Draco had been almost unconsciously waiting for, and then they settled down to wait.

* * *

_He doesn't understand the twisted in the same way. He doesn't see himself as one of them._

Harry stared ahead, through the shop's broken window, and tried to think about the loud conversation they'd had in the halls of the Ministry instead, involving Draco going to investigate the shop alone while Harry went to dinner at Ron and Hermione's house. The news should spread fast, if not tonight, to Alexander, and he should hear of it and come hunting. That was the way it _should _work.

But his mind kept returning to his inconclusive conversation with Draco, worrying it like a Crup with a Muggle's leg.

It had never occurred to him that Draco might not think of himself as a twisted, or as part of a possible category of twisted, and wonder about the Ministry's stance towards twisted in the same way that Harry was beginning to. But the more he thought about it, the more sense it made. Draco had been handed reasons to despise himself, if that was what he wanted, from his family and from the Ministry and from society in general. He couldn't have survived if he hadn't decided to listen to his own voice and pride at some point. Rejecting a definition that would have implicated him in something nasty and complicated was probably second nature now.

But Harry…

_It's another reason I have to go away. First I read every gesture he makes as sexual instead of innocent, and now I know that I might be the same as the people I'm chasing. I can't go on killing them without reconsidering what I'm doing. _

And if the Ministry didn't promote him out of the Socrates Corps or agree to revise its definition of the twisted?

Harry took a deep breath, and then swallowed. Well. He didn't know what would happen next, but he knew that it would involve a lot of reconsideration on his part. He had never wanted to leave the Ministry, never wanted all the people who shrieked at him that he was unsuited for Auror work to be right. But if it was a matter of morality instead of stubbornness, then, yes, he would have to think about it.

_It would mean leaving Draco behind._

_ No, _Harry corrected himself a moment later, thinking about it. _It would mean leaving him to get on with his own life._

He shook his head and then lifted it as he heard the scraping sounds outside the shop. One glance at Draco confirmed what he'd heard. Harry took his wand into his hand, but reminded himself that they should let the wards Draco had established do their work first. If one of them killed Alexander, then there was no need to fight, and certainly no need to reveal their presence.

There was a sharp sound, as though Alexander had pulled himself to a stop on broken glass. Harry refrained from looking at Draco because he wanted to keep an eye on the shattered window, but the hairs on the back of his neck stood up the way they did when he was speaking to Leah in her cell.

Then something that moved too fluidly for it to be human came over the windowsill and stepped straight into the ward Draco had set.

The night flared with light, like magnesium burning in water. The flames were tinged with green and blue on the edges, and they coiled around the creature in bright, sharp loops, like sword blades beaten into the shape of whips. Harry saw them bite deep.

It didn't matter. The creature rose up through them and then turned towards Harry, flowing at him.

Harry's hand went limp enough that his wand nearly fell to the floor. Mouths filled with teeth on every inch of skin, grey tendrils draped across it, eyeless eyes like small damp hollows in the center of its face…

It was the creature that had killed Lionel. And even knowing that it was one of Alexander's nightmare creations didn't matter, not when it could have all the same powers.

Draco stepped between it and Harry.

And that made Harry leap up, because no second slaughter would happen to his second partner, not on his watch. He dodged to the side and then leaped at the creature, making one of its tendrils turn towards him and the mouths snap defensively.

Harry jabbed his arm at it and roared the beginning of the spell that had taken it down last time. "_Ardens—_"

The tendril curled around his arm, and yanked. Harry felt the bones snap, and sagged to his knees, screaming in a high, thin voice he would have kept silent if he could have. Draco didn't deserve having to worry about him for that. It was a broken bone, it wasn't like he wouldn't heal—

Then the mouth on the end of the tendril turned up and locked onto the skin and flesh around his elbow, and _yanked_. Harry screamed again as the teeth devoured him, clicking and locking. That savage tongue flickered out after them and touched the wound a moment later, a spear of burning cold.

Harry knew what would be happening without looking. The monster could make new meat grow, but each time, it would be fainter and paler than it had been before. It kept its victims alive as a renewable food source until they faded into ghosts, forever locked in one form by suffering and pain.

Draco said something. Harry could only make out that much, not the words, through the pain that whirled and danced in his ears.

But it made the creature release Harry with a screech and turn towards him. Draco stood tall in front of it, pale and unafraid.

And vulnerable. He didn't know as much about fighting the thing as Harry did.

Harry grunted and forced himself to his feet. It didn't matter where Alexander was, not at the moment. It didn't matter if he ever got his flaw back. It didn't matter about his wounds.

He was not going to lose Draco. That was all there was to it.


	12. Cut Like an Axe

Thank you again for all the reviews! This is the last chapter of _This Enchanted Life; _the one-shot that follows it, "Letters from Exile," should be up next Wednesday.

_Chapter Twelve—Cut Like an Axe_

Draco felt the tendrils writhing around him, and had no doubt at all that they would soon begin to destroy and drain him the way they had Harry. The difference between him and Harry was that he didn't intend to stand still and let that happen. He coiled his arms in close to his body and shouted the first word of the incantation he had heard Harry trying before the beast hurt him too badly for him to manage it. "_Ardens!"_

It was not the complete spell, and so it could not destroy the creature. But Draco heard it bellow in pain and stagger backwards, and he was sure that he had done enough damage to make the beast reconsider. He smiled and watched some of the tendrils burn, the greasy smoke rising from them.

Harry tried to charge in front of him at the same moment as someone moved from the other side. Draco turned in that direction, but stuck his arm and leg out, so that Harry stumbled over them and couldn't crash into the beast. Draco had no intention of losing him, now or ever, and especially not losing him to a creature he had already mostly defeated.

The person off to the side was Alexander. And a globe was already in motion from his hand, one that blazed silver and green and made the world seem to turn over as Draco stared at it.

He could have pulled back his wand and tried to shield himself. But that would have meant not shielding Harry, or casting the spells he used then, ones that splinted Harry's broken arm and knocked back several of the creature's mouth-covered tendrils as they lashed out at him.

The globe hit Draco's chest. He saw the peace on Alexander's face a moment before he felt the ringing in his bones, the way the vibrations seemed to travel inside him and wrap around his heart like the coils of a snake. And he tilted his head back, and his body shook and the world splintered into light—

And then he was standing in a dungeon room with a view of the Hogwarts lake through the windows, and in front of him, Professor Snape turned away from a potion and watched him with eyes as cool as the light in the globe had been.

* * *

Draco dropped to the floor. Harry stared at him, and then up along the conduit of Alexander's arm to his face, and the way he was sweating and laughing both at once, his hand still extended as though he was glad to see the damage he had done.

The creature was behind the shields Draco had built, and couldn't touch him for the moment. The creature was irrelevant.

Alexander dropped his hand to his side, and shook his head slightly as he looked at Harry. "You might think your visions would have warned you of this, but I did not murder him," he said gently. "I only gave him the same chance that I gave others, to rest in dreams and see what might happen if he had made different choices."

Harry watched him from a distance that felt like one of the globes striking him, the same whirling sensations and yanking sensations. The creature hadn't broken through the shields yet, and he felt a faint surprise, and then nothing. The creature ultimately wasn't the one that had killed Lionel, a twisted so far gone that it changed from a person into something that had no name. It was one of Alexander's nightmare creations, and it obeyed him.

Like Lionel. He had never been real, only a treat that Alexander had held out to try and get Harry to agree to stop using his flaw. And there was—

There was a burning in the center of his chest, where Draco had been. And the knowledge that Draco might be gone forever, if he could not overcome the temptation of the vision that Alexander offered him, was enough to fill the hole.

Harry took a step forwards. Broken glass crunched under his feet. The beast had brought some in through the window with it, it seemed, or Alexander had. Alexander gave him another gentle smile and shook his head.

"You haven't yet seen my other nightmares," he said. "The nightmares that sprang up when I realized what the twisted were, and what _we _might do to Britain, if left unchecked. I have several more of them. Should I summon them? That would give you something to fight, if you wanted to. But I don't think you want to. I heard your words earlier. You know as well as I do that the twisted have to be stopped, and that you're one of them."

Harry was breathing gently. The burning ate at him, and ate at him, and his hands tightened on his wand until he could feel the wood cutting into his fingers. It might splinter. It might break, and he would be left without a defense.

"I know that you probably won't thank me," Alexander continued. "But when your friend rises from his sleep, his flaw will be gone, too, and nothing can make it come back. As long as both of you don't have the ability to become twisted, then I'm happy to let you go. I have others to find and fight."

Harry half-closed his eyes. His fingers eased on his wand, because he had remembered.

He might not have his flaw anymore, and if he broke his wand, he wouldn't have a way to fight with the magic contained in it, either. But those were not his only weapons. There was also the magic that had killed the beast when it tried to consume Lionel's body, and there was the will that had driven him to escape from St. Mungo's and kept him alive after that even though he was banned from ever coming to hospital again.

He reached out and pointed his wand towards Alexander, who shook his head wearily and lifted his hand. Shadows started to creep around him, no doubt because he was summoning the second of his nightmare creatures. "I told you already, there's no need for that, and it's not going to work—"

Harry gave a wordless shout, into which he poured magic. It could have been a real world in some other language. He knew it wasn't an incantation. But he made the sound that would suit the power boiling in him at the moment, a power as dangerous as a fall of scalding water.

And the power that would fit that sound answered his call, flooding out of him.

Something black and cold filled the space between Harry and Alexander. It looked as fluid and dangerous as the shadow-creature that had wrestled Draco the last time they were in Leah's shop, but Harry knew it wasn't the same. It was designed to do only one thing, and it rose up, formless and swaying back and forth.

"A cobra," Alexander murmured, watching it in some interest. "Or a wave. Either way, you won't get much out of me—"

"I want a lot out of you," Harry said quietly, and he snapped the cobra forwards with a slight hiss that might have made it move faster. Or not. He didn't understand anything about this magic, any more than he had understood that his flaw _was _a flaw at first. He felt dizzy and light-headed.

The cobra fastened its teeth on Alexander, and he stared at it. Harry was sure that he didn't really feel any sensation but cold and darkness at first. Perhaps a bit of dizziness from where it was starting to leach the power out of him.

Then he screamed.

Harry smiled, and pulled the leash on the cobra viciously tight. The cobra's teeth went deep, and deeper, and met what he was looking for, a burst and bubble of magic that sang to him. Harry drew his fist so tight that he could feel the bones aching under the skin, and pulled.

The cobra swallowed, and Harry's stolen flaw came rushing through the cobra's body, back to him. Harry caught it up and wrapped himself around it, bundling it into his heart and soul. He didn't know whether it was always the best gift, and he knew that he could have got along without it, but it was _his_, and he wanted it.

The cobra's fangs were still lodged in Alexander's body. He stirred, weakly, and the creature thrashed behind the barriers that Draco had set up. Harry ignored it. It wouldn't attack without a command more clearly phrased than any Alexander could come up with right now.

He pulled.

Draco's flaw came whistling down the tunnel that the cobra's body formed, and slammed into Harry. For a moment, he cradled it to him, a treasure more delicate than any glass globe. Then he turned and tossed it back to Draco. Familiar though it felt, powerful and treasured, what he _wanted _was to give it back to Draco, not to keep it for himself. He'd had enough of other people's magic inside him for a lifetime.

He thought he saw a spark of something bright out of the corner of his eye as the gift flew towards Draco, but he really couldn't be sure; he hadn't seen anything the proper way so far, the way he would have if the cobra was real and the transfer of the flaws was physical, so this might be just his imagination.

But it would be appropriate if Draco's flaw really looked like that, he thought. Dark in heritage though Draco might be, Dark as the magic might be that he used, he was light to Harry.

A sinking sensation seemed to happen in the center of his stomach, and Harry swallowed, his fingers clenching for a moment in his shirt and around his wand. If he was thinking like that about Draco, then he might be in a lot more trouble than he had realized…

But he thrust the thought away, because Alexander was stuttering and writhing back to his feet, not yet dead, and Harry didn't have the right to think about Draco like that. Not now, maybe not ever.

Alexander looked at him and shook his head. "You should not have done that," he whispered. "I will only begin the harvest all over again, and this time, I am going to start by making sure to kill you. And your partner. The other twisted can live, in comas or without them, as long as they yield their flaws. But you are going to die." And he flickered his head to the side to look at Draco.

Harry could have smiled and laughed at his threats, if he had left it to threatening him. So many people had spoken similar words to him by now that he didn't remember individual names.

But the thought of Alexander threatening Draco, and not because of something Draco had done but because of what he _was_, and because Alexander was mad, froze part of him inside, and then cracked it.

He raised his wand, not knowing what would come out of it until he heard his voice speaking the words, the same words of the incantation that he had used to destroy the creature that had killed Lionel.

"_Ardens corpus._"

* * *

Draco leaned back against the wall behind him, and nodded to all and sundry, which at the moment included just him and Professor Snape. "I admire the effort," he said aloud. "Home-like, really. But I know this is just a vision that Alexander conjured, and that takes away the temptation to believe it."

Alexander had got Severus Snape's face down to perfection, at least, the hard black eyes and the sneer that he would give Draco after hearing words like that. But then, Draco reminded himself, he had all of Draco's memories to pull from.

_This is a dream. Not reality. There's no reason to think Snape would say the same words to me if he was still alive._

"You were meant for a Potions master," Snape commented, picking up a vial full of crumbled leaves and sifting them across the surface of his potion the way that Draco imagined Harry would put cheese on something. Not that he'd ever seen him do that. Snape paused suddenly, and his dark eyes darted back up to Draco's. "You can't even identify them anymore, can you?" He held up the vial of crushed leaves, and watched the way Draco's face heated up.

"I decided not to be a Potions master," Draco said, and his voice was calm, his whole soul was calm. Alexander could only use visions of the dead, couldn't he? Or else he thought the dead were always more powerful than the living, and more likely to cause regret. Otherwise, he would have chosen Draco's parents. "An Auror career suits me."

"It suited you to anger your family," Snape said, and lounged back against the table behind him, watching the potion with one critical eye as it bubbled and steamed. "It suits you to contemplate Potter's arse while you prance about and pretend to be saving the world."

Draco shrugged. "I don't know anything about saving the world. It suits me to be in an Auror corps where my use of Dark magic goes unquestioned and no one looks too closely at anything I do. It suits me to have a famous partner who stands a chance of getting away with more than I ever will." He paused and flashed Snape a sharp smile. "And it suits me to contemplate that fine arse. Better than someone else contemplating it."

Snape watched him with a snake's slow malice, this time. Draco wondered if Snape resented him for surviving and escaping Snape's fate at the end of the war—

And then jerked himself up with a sharp tug on the reins of his mind. _Idiot. This isn't the real Snape. The only emotions he has are the ones that Alexander's poured into him, to try and convince you to give up your flaw._

"You know he will never accept you," Snape said, in the same relaxed tone he might have used to point out that Draco had ruined one of his potions. No, on second thought, he would have been angrier about the potion, because of the waste of ingredients rather than anything else. "You should know he fears that his feelings for you are as childish and silly as the obsession he imagined for his partner."

"If that's the way it starts, that's the way it starts," Draco said, and bit the corner of his lip to keep from smiling. If Alexander knew how glad he was to have someone to talk to this about, even a hostile audience, he wouldn't have started the conversation. "But it needn't stay there. I am receptive to Harry's advances, and sooner or later he'll see that."

"And you're not worried about the regulations that the Ministry puts on partners sleeping together?" Snape leaned forwards slightly.

Draco sighed. "We break the rules all the time, anyway. We're part of a Corps that I never heard of before I transferred into it, a Corps that has a different name and description on paper than it does in reality. I don't care about the regulations that Harry doesn't care about."

"He may care more about them than you think."

"Now you're reaching," Draco said. "And this conversation bores me. You don't have any more convincing arguments as to why I should do what you want than that, Alexander?"

The shape in front of him wavered and blurred, and Alexander's features seemed to stare through Snape's for a moment. Then he shook his head, and the long black hair fell across his face. Draco had never seen Snape make that particular gesture, however; it made him look vulnerable. His lip curled.

Alexander's illusion began to break apart again, and then abruptly, cracks appeared in the walls of the lab and he screamed. Draco laughed, even as a wrenching sensation in his stomach snatched him away from the illusion and back towards reality.

He didn't know exactly what had happened to Alexander, but he was willing to believe that its name rhymed with "Harry."

* * *

Harry burned Alexander.

He had burned the creature, too, the only way he could, casting a fire that destroyed all its tendrils and eyes and mouths because they were all part of the same body. It was useless to fight only one of them, since the creature could grow new ones any time it wanted. But burn the central body from which they all sprang, and the deed was done, and the creature wouldn't be able to resurrect itself from the flaming ash.

Harry burned Alexander's wand. He sent the flames flickering into his body in quest of his bones, and when they found them, he roasted and burned those, too. He burned his flesh, his muscles, his eyes, his tongue. He burned his magic.

Alexander had started screaming long since, but Harry was able to put the screams out of his mind with nothing more than a little serene concentration. The flames were harder to control, although based on the information that he had retrieved from Leah, Draco had pushed all the crates that contained especially flammable or explosive materials to the back of the shop. They didn't have to worry about burning evidence.

Draco stirred and groaned on the floor.

Draco was more important than anything else. With a series of swift incantations, Harry set up a ring of joined Shield Charms around the flames that would hold them. Then he knelt down beside Draco and braced one arm behind his back, so that he could sit up if he wanted to.

If he'd been thinking of it, he would have turned Draco's head to the side, so that he didn't have to watch Alexander burning to death. But he didn't think of it, and so Draco opened his eyes on the sight of roasting flesh in a bubbling case of skin.

Harry flinched, and his serenity cracked. He had—he had done something to Alexander that was worse than what they'd done to any other twisted, despite the fact that Alexander had really hurt fewer people. He started to yank his arm from beneath Draco's grip, to rise to his feet and end the spell.

Draco's hand closed down, holding Harry so fast that he hurt himself when he tried to pull free.

"No," Draco said, and Harry had no idea whether Draco was telling him not to pull away or not to end the spell on Alexander. But Harry still had one free hand, and he could wave his wand and end the spell. He did so, and the screaming ceased. Alexander collapsed in on himself in a pile of greasy ash.

Draco took a deep breath and turned to look at Harry. His eyes were huge and solemn, and Harry opened his mouth to ask what Draco had seen in the vision that Alexander had cast him into.

Instead, it was Draco who spoke, his hands sliding around Harry's neck and jaw as though he thought he would need to support his head in a moment. "Harry, did you realize that I know about your feelings for me?"

Burning and freezing inside him again, but this time Draco was alive, he had to remember that, no matter what Alexander had done to him he had managed to stay alive, and Harry was just trying to jerk away, long, steady pulls against Draco's hands that made him tighten his grip and shake his head urgently.

"Stop it, Harry!" he hissed, when Harry had almost managed to get free, and wrenched his neck in the process. "I promise, I'm not going to reject you like Lionel did. You arse, how could I do that with someone who's saved my life, whose life I've saved, someone who went on working with me even after I tortured him? Do you think that I'm like Vane, and you're the same person you were with him?"

Harry shook his head and ducked aside. This time, Draco let him go, but he remained sitting on the floor, staring at Harry so keenly there was no place to hide. Harry gasped, feeling as if icicles in the air had pierced his lungs.

"You _idiot_," Draco said, his voice barely recognizable. "I'm telling you that I'm _returning _your feelings, don't you see that? Doesn't it matter to you that that's what I'm doing?"

"I don't—I can't," Harry said, and recovered himself when he thought about the harm that he might cause to Draco otherwise. "I can't love someone, not really," he said, when he could catch his breath. "You were the one who told me. I was so disappointed that Lionel didn't return my crush that I made childish vows never to love anyone anymore. Who _does _that? Somebody who's still like a teenager, or a child, which is another way of saying the same thing. I have to show that I can love somebody for real. I have to get my head sorted out. I'm going to leave the Ministry for a while and see what happens."

He knew he didn't imagine the way Draco went stiff, staring at him, his hands—so graceful and fast, usually—lying there as if useless at the ends of his arms. But he thought he might have imagined Draco's headshake, so small was it at first. Harry turned his head away and swallowed, concentrating on the far wall.

"That's impossible," Draco whispered. "I offer you what you most want, and you want to _run away_?" Scorn thickened his voice. "I didn't think you were a coward. A lot of other things, but not that."

Harry turned and pointed a finger at the pile of ash that had been Alexander. And God, bile was rising in his throat and he really thought he would _sick up, _how could he have done something like that, he knew that he was violent sometimes but he had never thought it would be something like that, how—

Draco looked politely along his pointing finger and then turned back to Harry. "Yes? What about him?"

"I just destroyed him using a spell that's so Dark the Ministry would probably put it _immediately _on the list of Dark Arts if they knew about it," Harry snapped, making sure to keep his voice low, just in case someone came by the shop. "I'm a twisted, or a few steps away from one. I can't connect to other people in normal ways. What do you think these are but the first steps down that path? Twisted are mad wizards who use Dark Arts and kill people."

Draco stared at him. Then he said, "_That's _what you've been worrying about? You believed Leah when she accused us of being twisted?" He shook his head. "That's ridiculous—"

"It's not," Harry said. "If the lot of us are twisted in the Socrates Corps, then we have to think about whether we have any right to hunt them."

Draco made a great show of standing and brushing ash away from his cloak. Harry shuddered and looked aside. Draco seemed to have noticed, because his voice descended to a lower note. "I don't think of myself as twisted."

"But we kill people," Harry muttered, and dragged a shaking hand through his fringe. At the moment, he thought he could feel madness creeping around him, whether or not it had its claws in him yet. He was exploding with all the things he was feeling at the moment, and Draco wanted him to stay here and become his—his boyfriend, or something? It was too much. "We do."

"We aren't mad. At least, I'm not, and I won't let you drive yourself that way." Harry heard the quick steps, knew Draco was drawing nearer.

And knew he might stay if Draco touched him, might let himself be persuaded by those graceful, quick hands.

Harry reached down and tore, hard, at the Auror badge on his robes, flinging it in Draco's direction. Draco cursed and fumbled. He might have grabbed at it—a Seeker's instincts—but Harry didn't know if he'd been able to catch it.

"You'll receive the paperwork later," Harry said. "A leave of absence. I need it. It's the only thing that's going to make this any better." He tore off his Auror robes and draped them over his arms, then sprinted for the shop door.

"Harry."

Harry paused and glanced back. Touching or no touching, Draco could still command with his voice, it seemed.

Draco stood in the middle of the shop, staring at him so hard that the gaze was painful to sustain. He held up Harry's badge—the crossed wands—and gestured slightly with it.

"I'll keep this until you come back for it," he said. "And if you don't write to me, then I'll hunt you down and break your wand."

Harry swallowed, warmth spreading through him. They might disagree about what being twisted meant, and Harry still had no _idea _if the things he felt for Draco were real or not or whether he wanted them to be, but at least there was a connection there, and one that he didn't think would break.

He turned and scrambled once more for the open air. The night beyond the shop smelled sweet and cool, and he clasped trembling hands to his forehead, holding them there and waiting for them to stop trembling before he Apparated.

* * *

Draco turned back to the pile of ash that had been Alexander, shaking his head. The only thing he regretted about Harry's spell was that it left nothing of the body for him to kick.

"I won't wait forever," he whispered, in reassurance to himself and Harry both, though he doubted Harry was in earshot at the moment. He thought of the paperwork he would have to file on the case and owl to Harry, and then smiled. Inside, he felt—not as he should have. Sharper, brighter, clearer, and not as upset.

"If you don't come back, I'll come and find you."

He bent down to retrieve his wand, quelled the last of Harry's flames raging behind the Shield Charms, and left the ashes behind.

**The End.**


End file.
